A New High-Brightness Ultrafast Vacuum-Ultraviolet Light-Source

Abstract

Optical soliton dynamics in a waveguide can cause the extreme alteration of the temporal and spectral shape of a propagating light pulse. They occur at watt to kilowatt peak power in glass-core optical fibres and up to the gigawatt level in gas-filled microstructured hollow-core fibres. We have demonstrated, for the first time, optical soliton dynamics in conventional large-core hollow capillary fibres. Our analysis and modelling show that this enables further scaling of soliton effects by several orders of magnitude to the multi-mJ energy and terawatt peak power level. We experimentally demonstrate two key soliton effects. First, we observe self-compression to sub-cycle pulses and infer the creation of sub-femtosecond field waveforms—a route to high-power optical attosecond pulse generation. Second, we efficiently generate continuously tunable high-energy (up to 16 μJ) pulses in the vacuum and deep ultraviolet spectral region (110 nm to 400 nm) through resonant dispersive-wave emission. These pulses are expected to have a duration of 2 fs. This new regime of high-energy ultrafast soliton effects promises to be the foundation of a new generation of table-top light sources for ultrafast strong-field physics and advanced spectroscopy.

Date
Apr 4, 2019 14:00
Location
Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, Oxfordshire, UK
John C. Travers
John C. Travers
Professor of Physics
Teodora F. Grigorova
Teodora F. Grigorova
Research Associate
Christian Brahms
Christian Brahms
Assistant Professor
Federico Belli
Federico Belli
Research Fellow