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.
Highlights
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
The advent of photonic bandgap (PBG)-guiding hollowcore photonic crystal fibre (HC-PCF)[17] showed promise to overcome these limitations of hollow capillaries following the pioneering demonstration of megawatt peak power solitons in this type of fibres[18,19]
We exploit the latest advances in the inhibited coupling (IC) guiding HC-PCF design that have led to a lower transmission loss and a smaller power fraction propagating inside the glass walls[16] much improved single-mode operation[31], and a controllable negative dispersion
Summary
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. The enhanced solitonic compression scenario is enabled by a fortunate combination of the waveguiding mechanism, optical nonlinearities and dispersion properties of a hypocycloid core Kagome-lattice HC-PCF16 We show both experimentally and theoretically, that, in a single step, ultrashort infrared pulses with energies of several tens of microjoules undergo a 20-fold nonlinear self-compression to reach the pulse duration of 4.5 fs full-width at half-maximum, below the optical period of 5 fs and a gigawatt peak power at the fibre exit. We applied rigorous pulse characterization techniques based on stereo-ATI and SPIDER (spectral phase interferometry for direct electric field reconstruction[28], Supplementary Methods section ‘Pulse generation and characterization experimental set-up’ and Supplementary Figs 1,2) to attest that a subcycle duration of the self-compressed pulse can be reached This Kagome-fibre-driven and single-step self-compression scheme allow a great simplification of the attosecond and field-sensitive measurements, such as ATI electron spectrometry, coincidence momentum imaging and THz generation in plasma
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