Spectra extending from 600 to 1200 nm have been generated from a Kerr-lens mode-locked Ti:sapphire laser producing 5-fs pulses. Specially designed double-chirped mirror pairs provide broadband controlled dispersion, and a second intracavity focus in a glass plate provides additional spectral broadening. These spectra are to our knowledge the broadest ever generated directly from a laser oscillator.
We present a new method for measuring the spectral phase of ultrashort pulses that utilizes spectral shearing interferometry with zero delay. Unlike conventional spectral phase interferometry for direct electric-field reconstruction, which encodes phase as a sensitively calibrated fringe in the spectral domain, two-dimensional spectral shearing interferometry robustly encodes phase along a second dimension. This greatly reduces demands on the spectrometer and allows for complex phase spectra to be measured over extremely large bandwidths, potentially exceeding 1.5 octaves.
Nonlinear optical effects due to the phase between carrier and envelope are observed with 5 fs pulses from a Kerr-lens mode-locked Ti:sapphire laser. These sub-two-cycle pulses with octave spanning spectra are the shortest pulses ever generated directly from a laser oscillator. Detection of the carrier-envelope phase slip is made possible by simply focusing the short pulses directly from the oscillator into a BBO crystal. As a further example of nonlinear optics with such short pulses, the interference between second- and third-harmonic components is also demonstrated.
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