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Intense few-cycle visible pulses directly generated via nonlinear fibre mode mixing

Nature Photonics volume 15, pages 884–889 (2021)Cite this article

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Abstract

Extremely short, high-energy pulses are essential in modern ultrafast science. In a seminal paper in 19961, Nisoli and co-workers demonstrated the first intense pulse compression employing a gas-filled hollow-core fibre. Despite the huge body of scientific work on this technology stemming from ultrafast and attosecond research, here we identify an unexplored few-cycle visible-light generation mechanism, which relies on the nonlinear mixing of hollow-core fibre modes. Using a commercially available ytterbium laser, we generate 4.6 fs, 20 μJ pulses centred at around 600 nm (~2 cycles, ~4 GW peak power), ~40 times shorter than the input 175 fs, 1 mJ pulses at 1,035 nm. Our approach thus directly projects few-hundred-femtosecond-long infrared pulses into the single-cycle regime at visible frequencies, without the need for additional post-compression. As a powerful application of our findings, we present a compact, multicolour pump–probe set-up with a temporal resolution of a few optical cycles.

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Fig. 1: Sketch of the generation mechanism, output energy and spectra.
Fig. 2: VIS pulse formation.
Fig. 3: Comparison between numerical and experimental results.
Fig. 4: Few-cycle IR pump/VIS probe set-up.

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Data availability

The data that support the plots within this paper and other findings of this study are available from the corresponding authors upon reasonable request.

Code availability

The computer code used in this study is available from the corresponding authors upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) (Collaborative Research and Development (CRD) and Discovery Grants) and Prompt, Québec. J.M.B. acknowledges support from the Air Force Office of Scientific Research under MURI award no. FA9550-16-1-0013. R.M. is affiliated to IFFS as an adjoint faculty.

Author information

Author notes

  1. R. Piccoli

    Present address: Department of Physics of Complex Systems, Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel

  2. J. M. Brown

    Present address: Department of Computer Science, Wisconsin Lutheran College, Milwaukee, WI, USA

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institut National de la Recherche Scientifique, Centre Énergie Matériaux Télécommunications (INRS-EMT), Varennes, Québec, Canada

    R. Piccoli, Y.-G. Jeong, A. Rovere, L. Zanotto, F. Légaré, R. Morandotti & L. Razzari

  2. Centre de Physique Théorique, CNRS, Ecole Polytechnique, Institut Polytechnique de Paris, Palaiseau, France

    J. M. Brown & A. Couairon

  3. Department of Physics & Astronomy, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA, USA

    J. M. Brown & M. B. Gaarde

  4. School of Engineering and Physical Sciences, Heriot-Watt University, Edinburgh, UK

    J. C. Travers

  5. IFFS, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China

    R. Morandotti

  6. few-cycle Inc., Varennes, Québec, Canada

    B. E. Schmidt

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Contributions

R.P. performed the experiments with the support of Y.-G.J., A.R. and L.Z. J.M.B. performed the numerical simulations. A.C., M.B.G. and J.C.T. supervised the numerical simulations. B.E.S. and L.R. conceived the study and supervised its realization. R.M. and F.L. provided technical support. All the authors discussed the experimental results and helped with the preparation of the manuscript.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to R. Piccoli, B. E. Schmidt or L. Razzari.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Peer review information Nature Photonics thanks Daniele Faccio and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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Supplementary Information

Supplementary Figs. 1–23 and description of the numerical model.

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Piccoli, R., Brown, J.M., Jeong, YG. et al. Intense few-cycle visible pulses directly generated via nonlinear fibre mode mixing. Nat. Photon. 15, 884–889 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-021-00888-7

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