A strong-field driver in the single-cycle regime based on self-compression in a kagome fibre

T. Balciunas (1) , Coralie Fourcade Dutin (2) , G. Fan , T Witting (3) , A. Voronin , A M Zheltikov (4) , Frédéric Gérôme (2) , G. Paulus , A. Baltuska (1) , Fetah A. Benabid (2)

1 TU Wien - Vienna University of Technology = Technische Universität Wien
2 XLIM-PHOT - Photonique Fibre et Sources Cohérentes
3 Imperial College London
4 MSU - Lomonosov Moscow State University

Over the past decade intense laser fields with a single-cycle duration and even shorter, subcycle multicolour field transients have been generated and applied to drive attosecond phenomena in strong-field physics. Because of their extensive bandwidth, single-cycle fields cannot be emitted or amplified by laser sources directly and, as a rule, are produced by external pulse compression—a combination of nonlinear optical spectral broadening followed up by dispersion compensation. Here we demonstrate a simple robust driver for high-field applications based on this Kagome fibre approach that ensures pulse self-compression down to the ultimate single-cycle limit and provides phase-controlled pulses with up to a 100 μJ energy level, depending on the filling gas, pressure and the waveguide length.

Domaines: Optique / photonique

T. Balciunas, Coralie Fourcade Dutin, G. Fan, T Witting, A. Voronin, et al.. A strong-field driver in the single-cycle regime based on self-compression in a kagome fibre. Nature Communications, 2015, 6 (6117), ⟨10.1038/ncomms7117⟩. ⟨hal-01321457⟩