Ultrafast DUV/VUV light

Using a gas-filled kagomé-PCF we demonstrated nonlinear compression of a 1030 nm, 300 fs (FWHM) fibre laser pulses to sub-30-fs, and high energy tunable ultraviolet emission at 9.7 MHz repetition rate through dispersive wave emission from self-compressed higher-order solitons (Fig. 2). The UV pulses are tunable between at least 270 and 320 nm, simply by changing the gas pressure in the fibre, and have up to 70 nJ of pulse energy and 0.7 W of average power [Köttig (2015)].

As an alternative to dispersive wave emission we generated DUV light pulses via four-wave mixing in a Ar–filled kagomé-PCF [Belli (2016)]. Ultrafast four-wave mixing permits independent control over both pulse bandwidth and central frequency, and potentially offers even broader bandwidth, higher conversion efficiencies, and reduced energy fluctuations (through gain saturation). We demonstrated up to 30% conversion efficiency from a pump wavelength of 400 nm to a signal at 266 nm, when also seeding at the idler wavelength of 800 nm. At the optimum phase-matching pressure, and optimal setting of the delay between the pump and idler, we achieved 490 nJ at the signal wavelength, with a 10.4 nm broad spectrum, which would support ~10 fs pulses. The energies required are easily within reach of high repetition-rate pump sources, offering average power scalability. 

We made use of a single-ring ARR-PCF structure to generate an ultra-wide, high-energy supercontinuum extending into the mid-infrared [Cassataro (2016)]. The experiments were performed by pumping the single-ring HC-PCF with pulses generated by a commercial OPA system, wavelengths between 1.5 and 1.9 µm, duration 28 fs and energies between 1 and 20 µJ. The figure shows the supercontinuum generated in a 5-cm-long fibre filled with noble gases and pumped at 1.5-1.7 µm. In-fibre soliton dynamics (in particular dispersive-wave emission and subsequent soliton recoil) result in a supercontinuum spanning more than 3 octaves (at the –30 dB level), reaching 3 µm. Such broad spectra could be used to generate single-cycle pulses in the mid-IR. 

In recent work we explored the use of the plasma-driven soliton self-frequency blue-shift [Hoelzer (2011)] to frequency-tune high harmonic generation. A He-filled kagomé-style ARR-PCF was used to compress 25 fs, 800 nm pulses, with energies in the range 10-50 µJ, and to deliver them to a pulsed Ar-jet in a vacuum chamber so as to generate high harmonics in the extreme ultraviolet. The He pressure was selected so that the pulses propagated in the anomalous dispersion regime with relatively low soliton order (between 2 and 5, depending on the input energy). Under these conditions, the pulse gets shorter with increasing input energy, its peak intensity rises and the influence of ionization becomes more important, eventually causing the self-compressing pulse to blue-shift in frequency. As a result, the harmonics generated by blue-shifted solitons also shift to shorter wavelengths as the input energy is increased. In this way, the harmonic frequency could be continuously tuned over a range greater than the spacing between them [Tani (2016)].