posted on 2023-11-30, 19:06authored byChristian Brahms, Federico Belli, John C. Travers
Infrared femtosecond laser pulses are important tools both in strong-field physics, driving X-ray high-harmonic generation, and as the basis for widely tuneable, if inefficient, ultrafast sources in the visible and ultraviolet. Although anomalous material dispersion simplifies compression to few-cycle pulses, attosecond pulses in the infrared have remained out of reach. We demonstrate soliton self-compression of 1800 nm laser pulses in hollow capillary fibers to sub-cycle envelope duration (2 fs) with 27 GW peak power, corresponding to attosecond field transients. In the same system, we generate wavelength-tuneable few-femtosecond pulses from the ultraviolet (300 nm) to the infrared (740 nm) with energy up to 25 $\mu$J and efficiency up to 12 %, and experimentally characterize the generation dynamics in the time-frequency domain. A compact second stage generates multi-$\mu$J pulses from 210 nm to 700 nm using less than 200 $\mu$J of input energy. Our results significantly expand the toolkit available to ultrafast science.
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