Nonlinear compression toward high-energy single-cycle pulses by cascaded focus and compression

Abstract

The advancement of contemporary ultrafast science requires reliable sources to provide high-energy few-cycle light pulses. Through experiments and simulations, we demonstrate an arrangement of pulse postcompression, referred to as cascaded focus and compression (CASCADE), for generating millijoule-level, single-cycle pulses in a compact fashion. CASCADE is realized by a series of foci in matter, whereas pulse compression is provided immediately after each focus to maintain a high efficiency of spectral broadening. By implementing four stages of CASCADE in argon cells, we achieve 50-fold compression of millijoule-level pulses at 1030 nanometers from 157 to 3.1 femtoseconds, with an output pulse energy of 0.98 millijoules and a transmission efficiency of 73%. When driving high harmonic generation, these single-cycle pulses enable the creation of a carrier-envelope phase-dependent extreme ultraviolet continuum with energies extending up to 180 electron volts, providing isolated attosecond pulses at the output.

Suppression of Pulse Intensity Dependent Dispersion during Nonlinear Spectral Broadening with Intermediate Compression for Passive CEP Stable Pulse Generation

“…For applications requesting extreme low CEP noise or with very noisy input pulses, multiple compression stages can be used without dramatically increasing the complexity of the system. For instance, the usage of three intermediate compression stages have been reported to achieve single-cycle pulses with input from a Yb:KGW laser [27].…”

Generating high repetition rate X-ray attosecond pulses in a diffraction limited storage ring

“…We adopted GENESIS 38 and ELEGANT 39 codes to perform the laser modulation and beam tracking in the ADM beamline. After interacting with a near single cycle 800 nm laser, which is available with the state of the art technology 40 , within a 0.4 m long wiggler with one period, the electron beam passes through the dogleg, then a microbunching is generated. The local current is amplified by 24 times and the peak local bunching factor is about 0.16, as shown in Fig.…”

Probing electron and lattice dynamics by ultrafast electron microscopy: Principles and applications

“…The emergence of ultrashort pulse laser technology 21–26 offers an excellent strategy for studying this problem. Ultrashort lasers use extremely short periods of light exposure, 27–29 providing an unprecedented shutter speed for photographing the motion of microscopic particles, 30–34 where, the shorter the pulse width of the laser pulse, the faster the shutter speed. Thus, generating shorter laser pulses has become an important aspect of ultrafast science 35,36 .…”