Pre-Chirp-Managed Adiabatic Soliton Compression in Pressure-Gradient Hollow-Core Fibers

Post-pulse-compression is demanded to produce energetic few-cycle pulses. We propose pre-chirp-managed adiabatic soliton compression (ASC) in gas-filled pressure-gradient hollow-core fibers to suppress the detrimental pedestals and therefore significantly improve the compressed pulse quality. We show that two-stage ASC can compress 125 μJ, 130 fs pulses at 2 μm to a nearly two-cycle pulse 15 fs in duration. Our analytical analysis suggests that ASC is in favor of compressing pulses centered at a longer wavelength. As an example, a 280 μJ, 220 fs Gaussian pulse at 4 μm is compressed to 60 fs with minimal pedestals. We expect that the resulting high-quality, energetic few-cycle pulses will find important applications in high-field science.

Optical Soliton Compression in Dispersion Decreasing Fibers with Relaxing Kerr Effect

Optical soliton compression in dispersion decreasing fibers with relaxing Kerr effect was investigated numerically. The results were compared with the instantaneous nonlinear response case. It was observed that, in general, the relaxing Kerr effect produces significantly worse results than the instantaneous nonlinear response. However, by the appropriate choice of fiber length, one can obtain a higher compression factor if the relaxation time is sufficiently short.