Methane-filled hollow fiber: A cost-effective pathway to compress high repetition rate ytterbium femtosecond lasers using self-phase modulation

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Abstract Hollow-core fiber (HCF) based temporal pulse compression is widely used to generate few-cycle pulses. Here, we demonstrate the strength of methane (CH4) as a nonlinear medium for HCF-based pulse compressors to achieve high average power few-cycle pulses of sub-16 fs duration with > 70% transmission and up to 250 kHz repetition rate in a compact setup and present it as a cost-effective alternative to highly expensive and scarcely available noble gases.