Experimental study on the chirped structure of the white-light continuum generation by femtosecond laser spectroscopy

Abstract

The chirped structure of the white-light continuum generation (WLCG) pulse produced by focusing 800nm laser pulse with a pulse duration of 150fs (FWHM: full-width-at-half-maximum) onto a 2.4 mm thick sapphire plate was investigated by the optical Kerr gate technique with normal hexane as the optical Kerr gate medium. The observed WLCG was positively chirped, the measured anti-Stokes spectrum of WLCG ranges from 449 to 580nm with a temporal span of 2.56ps. When using metal reflecting mirrors to eliminate the group velocity dispersion (GVD) effect, we found that a span of 1.3ps still remained, indicating that the chirped pulse cannot be accounted for simply by GVD of the pulse propagation in the dispersive media. Our results suggest that the light-induced refractive index change due to the third-order nonlinear optical effect leads to an additional positive group velocity dispersion, which contributes to an important portion of the observed temporal broadening of the chirped WLCG. In addition to using reflective optical elements instead of dispersive optical elements, an effective way of reducing the chirp is to minimize the optical path length of the WLCG medium.