Supercontinuum generation in the vacuum ultraviolet through dispersive-wave and soliton-plasma interaction in a noble-gas-filled hollow-core photonic crystal fiber

Ermolov, Alexey; Mak, Ka Fai; Frosz, Michael H.; Travers, John C.; Russell, P. St. J.

doi:10.1103/physreva.92.033821

Cited by 113 publications

(91 citation statements)

References 62 publications

(81 reference statements)

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“…They underlie a wide range of important phenomena in nonlinear optics, especially in fibres. Some key examples are extreme pulse self-compression [16][17][18][19][20], the formation of white-light supercontinua [21], and the efficient generation of frequency-tunable pulses through resonant dispersive-wave (RDW) emission [17,18,[22][23][24][25][26]. Such effects have been thought impossible to achieve in HCF in the visible and near-infrared (NIR) [27,28] due to their weak dispersion in these spectral regions.…”

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confidence: 99%

High-energy pulse self-compression and ultraviolet generation through soliton dynamics in hollow capillary fibres

et al. 2019

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Optical soliton dynamics in a waveguide can cause the extreme alteration of the temporal and spectral shape of a propagating light pulse. They occur at watt to kilowatt peak power in glass-core optical fibres and up to the gigawatt level in gas-filled microstructured hollow-core fibres. Here we demonstrate, for the first time, optical soliton dynamics in conventional large-core hollow capillary fibres. Our analysis and modelling show that this enables further scaling of soliton effects by several orders of magnitude to the multi-mJ energy and terawatt peak power level. We experimentally demonstrate two key soliton effects. First, we observe self-compression to sub-cycle pulses and infer the creation of sub-femtosecond field waveforms-a route to high-power optical attosecond pulse generation. Second, we efficiently generate continuously tunable high-energy (1-13 µJ) pulses in the vacuum and deep ultraviolet spectral region (110 nm to 400 nm) through resonant dispersive-wave emission. This new regime of high-energy ultrafast soliton effects promises to be the foundation of a new generation of table-top light sources for ultrafast strong-field physics and advanced spectroscopy. * j.travers@hw.ac.uk; http://lupo-lab.com arXiv:1811.05877v1 [physics.optics]

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High-energy pulse self-compression and ultraviolet generation through soliton dynamics in hollow capillary fibres

et al. 2019

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“…Optical soliton dynamics, obtained by balancing linear and nonlinear contributions to the phase of a propagating light pulse, are a key phenomenon in nonlinear fibre optics. Resonant dispersive wave (RDW) emission in gas-filled hollow fibres is a particularly promising application of this effect, enabling the generation of tuneable ultrashort pulses and supercontinua at shorter wavelengths than possible in any solid-core waveguide [1,2,3,4,5], from the vacuum ultraviolet to the visible spectral region. These dynamics were pioneered in hollow-core photonic-crystal fibres (HC-PCF).…”

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High-energy ultraviolet dispersive-wave emission in compact hollow capillary systems

et al. 2019

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We demonstrate high-energy resonant dispersivewave emission in the deep ultraviolet (218 to 375 nm) from optical solitons in short (15 to 34 cm) hollow capillary fibres. This down-scaling in length compared to previous results in capillaries is achieved by using small core diameters (100 and 150 µm) and pumping with 6.3 fs pulses at 800 nm. We generate pulses with energies of 4 to 6 µJ across the deep ultraviolet in a 100 µm capillary and up to 11 µJ in a 150 µm capillary. From comparisons to simulations we estimate the ultraviolet pulse to be 2 to 2.5 fs in duration. We also numerically study the influence of pump duration on the bandwidth of the dispersive wave. Optical soliton dynamics, obtained by balancing linear and nonlinear contributions to the phase of a propagating light pulse, are a key phenomenon in nonlinear fibre optics. Resonant dispersive wave (RDW) emission in gas-filled hollow fibres is a particularly promising application of this effect, enabling the generation of tuneable ultrashort pulses and supercontinua at shorter wavelengths than possible in any solid-core waveguide [1,2,3,4,5], from the vacuum ultraviolet to the visible spectral region. These dynamics were pioneered in hollow-core photonic-crystal fibres (HC-PCF). Recently, we demonstrated that they can be scaled in energy by up to several orders of magnitude in simple hollow capillary fibres (HCF) [5]. Pumping gas-filled large-core HCF with 10 fs pulses enabled soliton self-compression to 1 fs in the near infrared-an optical attosecond pulse-and the generation of few-femtosecond vacuum and deep ultraviolet (VUV/DUV) pulses at unprecedented peak power, comparable to free-electron lasers. We also showed that up-scaling of those dynamics to the terrawatt scale is feasible by further increasing the HCF core size. Here, we down-scale the core size instead to achieve a more compact and practical setup. Whereas our first demonstration made use of 3 m HCF, here we show that this can be reduced to just 15 to 34 cm when using small-core HCF and even shorter pump pulses-6.3 fs, as readily generated in widely used conventional HCF pulse compression systems. The required pulse energy is also reduced, which is an additional advantage if multiple frequency conversion schemes are to be driven simultaneously, as for instance in multi-colour time-resolved spectroscopy experiments.The HCF length required to generate a dispersive wave is primarily determined by the distance over which soliton selfcompression occurs. This is well approximated by the fission length L f ,where N is the soliton order and L d and L nl are the dispersion and nonlinear lengths, describing the length scales of groupvelocity dispersion (GVD) and self-phase modulation (SPM), respectively [6]. Broadly similar soliton dynamics and RDW emission can be obtained with different parameters, provided that the soliton order and the zero-dispersion wavelength λ zd remain the same. In particular, the spectral location of RDW emission is chiefly determined by the pump wavelength λ0 and λ zd . W...

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“…DW emission in the deep and vacuum UV has been demonstrated in gas-filled HC-PCFs [19][20][21], and deep UV pulses with 72 nJ energy have been generated at 9.6 MHz repetition rate [22]. High-repetition rate (38 MHz) dispersive wave emission in the visible, with 13 nJ pulse energy, has also been reported [14].…”

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Generation of microjoule pulses in the deep ultraviolet at megahertz repetition rates

Köttig¹,

Tani²,

Biersach³

et al. 2017

Optica

101

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Although ultraviolet (UV) light is important in many areas of science and technology, there are very few if any lasers capable of delivering wavelength-tunable ultrashort UV pulses at MHz repetition rates. Here we report the generation of deep-UV laser pulses at MHz repetition rates and µJ-energies by means of dispersive wave (DW) emission from self-compressed solitons in gas-filled single-ring hollow-core photonic crystal fiber (SR-PCF). Pulses from an ytterbium fiber laser (~300 fs) are first compressed to ~25 fs in a SR-PCF-based nonlinear compression stage, and subsequently used to pump a second SR-PCF stage for broadband DW generation in the deep UV. The UV wavelength is tunable by selecting the gas species and the pressure. At 100 kHz repetition rate, a pulse energy of 1.05 µJ was obtained at 205 nm (average power 0.1 W), and at 1.92 MHz, a pulse energy of 0.54 µJ was obtained at 275 nm (average power 1.03 W).Ultraviolet (UV) laser pulses are in great demand for a wide range of applications, including photolithography [1], spectroscopy [2] and femtosecond pump-probe measurements [3]. Despite this, the range of available sources is limited. Apart from large-scale synchrotrons and free-electron lasers, very few lasers directly emit UV light, examples being excimer and some solid-state lasers (e.g., cerium-based [4]). An alternative approach involves upconversion of visible or near-infrared laser light via the generation of discrete harmonics in χ (2) and χ (3) media [5,6]. Using an optical parametric amplifier as pump laser provides wavelength-tunability in the UV, and with careful design very short pulse durations can be achieved [7]. Although such systems are flexible, they are also complex, and repetition rate scaling is challenging because of the high pump energies required. On the other hand, fiber and thin-disk technology allows repetition rate scaling in the near-infrared, pushing the frontiers of ultrafast lasers to unprecedented average power levels [8,9]. Much research is devoted to using these lasers for the generation of extreme UV light via high-harmonic generation [10,11]. To this end, pulse compression schemes are commonly employed, based for example on spectral broadening in bulk material [12] or gas-filled capillary and hollow-core photonic crystal fibers (HC-PCFs). This has allowed pulse compression from hundreds of fs to the few-cycle regime in set-ups involving two fiber stages [13,14]. In capillary fibers, spectral broadening normally occurs via self-phase modulation (SPM) in the normal dispersion regime, which requires the use of negatively chirped mirrors after the fiber and compresses the pulses in time by compensating for the induced chirp. If instead soliton-effect self-compression in the anomalous dispersion regime is used, there is no need for dispersion compensation. While this is difficult to achieve in large-bore capillary fibers (anomalous dispersion can only be achieved at very low gas pressures), it is straightforward in HC-PCFs, which deliver low loss even for small core di...

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Supercontinuum generation in the vacuum ultraviolet through dispersive-wave and soliton-plasma interaction in a noble-gas-filled hollow-core photonic crystal fiber

Cited by 113 publications

References 62 publications

High-energy pulse self-compression and ultraviolet generation through soliton dynamics in hollow capillary fibres

High-energy pulse self-compression and ultraviolet generation through soliton dynamics in hollow capillary fibres

High-energy ultraviolet dispersive-wave emission in compact hollow capillary systems

Generation of microjoule pulses in the deep ultraviolet at megahertz repetition rates

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