Spectral and spatial full-bandwidth correlation analysis of bulk-generated supercontinuum in the mid-infrared.

We report the measurement of spectral and spatial correlations in supercontinua generated by focusing microjoule pulses from a femtosecond ytterbium-doped fiber amplifier laser in bulk YAG. The measurement is full-bandwidth at a repetition rate of 1 MHz owing to the use of time-stretch dispersive Fourier transform technique. In contrast with fiber-based supercontinuum generation, our results show an excellent stability of the spectral and spatial properties of the output supercontinuum, with an essentially correlated behavior in the 1.

Self-compression to sub-3-cycle duration of mid-infrared optical pulses in dielectrics.

We present the first demonstration of sub-3 cycle optical pulses at 3.1 μm central wavelength generated through self-compression in the anomalous dispersion regime in a dielectric. The pulses emerging from this compact and efficient self-compression setup could be focused to intensities exceeding 10(14) W/cm(2), a suitable range for high field physics experiments.

Simulations of petawatt-class few-cycle optical-parametric chirped-pulse amplification, including nonlinear refractive index effects.

We present three-dimensional simulations of optical-parametric chirped-pulse amplification stages for a few-cycle petawatt-class laser. The simulations take into account the effects of depletion, diffraction, walk-off, quantum noise, and the nonlinear refractive index (n(2)). In the absence of n(2) effects, we show these stages can generate 3.