Abstract
Previously, pulses shorter than 4 fs were generated by compressing white light from gas-filled hollow-core fibers with adaptive phase modulators; however, the energy of the few-cycle pulses was limited to 15 microJ. Here, we report the generation of 550 microJ, 5 fs pulses by using a liquid crystal spatial light modulator in a grating-based 4f system. The high pulse energy was obtained by improving the throughput of the phase modulator and by increasing the input laser energy. When the pulses were used in high harmonic generation, it was found that the harmonic spectra depend strongly on the high order spectral phases of the driving laser fields.
Highlights
High energy laser pulses containing a mono-cycle or few-cycle field oscillations are crucial for generating single, isolated attosecond pulses from gases and plasmas, as well as for many other high field physics studies [1,2,3,4,5]
In conclusion, by improving the throughput of an adaptive phase modulator and by applying it to a high power laser system, we compressed laser pulses to ~5 fs at half-millijoule energy levels
As far as we know, this is the highest energy few-cycle pulse ever achieved by adaptive pulse compressors
Summary
High energy laser pulses containing a mono-cycle or few-cycle field oscillations are crucial for generating single, isolated attosecond pulses from gases and plasmas, as well as for many other high field physics studies [1,2,3,4,5]. The most frequently used method to compress white-light pulses from hollow-core fibers or filaments is the chirped mirrors. Chirped mirrors only compensate GDD and the third order dispersions, while fourth and higher order phase control is important for compressing pulses to a mono-cycle field oscillation. Adaptive phase modulators have high flexibility of phase control In principle, they can be adjusted to cope with the day to day phase variations of the white-light pulses and to compensate the high order phase errors. The low pulse energy is the main obstacle to applying pulses from adaptive phase modulator compressors to strong field physics experiments. We improved the throughput of the adaptive phase modulator and applied it to a hollow-core fiber with high output energy in order to obtain two-cycle pulses with sub-millijoule energy
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