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

Balciunas, T; Fourcade-Dutin, C; Fan, G; Witting, T; Voronin, A A; Zheltikov, A M; Gerome, F; Paulus, G G et al. · Nat Commun · 2015

basic_science · Level V

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Abstract

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.