The field of attosecond science was first enabled by nonlinear compression of intense laser pulses to a duration below two optical cycles. Twenty years later, creating such short pulses still requires state-of-the-art few-cycle laser amplifiers to most efficiently exploit “instantaneous” optical nonlinearities in noble gases for spectral broadening and parametric frequency conversion. Here, we show that nonlinear compression can be much more efficient when driven in molecular gases by pulses substantially longer than a few cycles because of enhanced optical nonlinearity associated with rotational alignment. We use 80-cycle pulses from an industrial-grade laser amplifier to simultaneously drive molecular alignment and supercontinuum generation in a gas-filled capillary, producing more than two octaves of coherent bandwidth and achieving >45-fold compression to a duration of 1.6 cycles. As the enhanced nonlinearity is linked to rotational motion, the dynamics can be exploited for long-wavelength frequency conversion and compressing picosecond lasers.
Abstract. By numerically solving the time-dependent Schrödinger equation, we calculate the ionization probability of a vibrating H + 2 exposed to ultrashort intense laser fields. The results show that the ionization probability increases by time and gets a saturation value. We also find that with some first vibration levels, the ionization probability from a higher vibration level is larger than that from a lower one. However, with higher vibration levels, at a certain level the ionization probability will take maximum and decrease with next levels.
Few-cycle sources with high average powers are required for applications to attosecond science. Raman-enhanced spectral broadening of Yb-doped laser amplifiers in molecular gases can yield few-cycle pulses, but thermal excitation of vibrational and rotational degrees of freedom may preclude high-power operation. Here we investigate changes in the spectral broadening associated with repetitive laser interactions in an
N
2
O
-filled hollow-core fiber. By comparing experimental measurements of the spectrum associated with each laser pulse to simulations based on a density matrix model, we find that losses in a spectral bandwidth and transmission are largely dominated by thermal excitation of the gas.
The delayed optical nonlinearity of molecules is harnessed to generate a multi-octave supercontinuum and compress 280 fs pulses from a commercial Yb:KGW laser amplifier to sub-two cycle duration using an N2O filled hollow-core fiber.
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