No Arabic abstract
Supercritical Xe at 293 K offers a Kerr nonlinearity that can exceed that of fused silica while being free of Raman scattering. It also has a much higher optical damage threshold and a transparency window that extends from the UV to the infrared. We report the observation of nonlinear phenomena, such as self-phase modulation, in hollow-core photonic crystal fiber filled with supercritical Xe. In the subcritical regime, intermodal four-wave-mixing resulted in the generation of UV light in the HE12 mode. The normal dispersion of the fiber at high pressures means that spectral broadening can clearly obtained without influence from soliton effects or material damage.
The effective Kerr nonlinearity of hollow-core kagome-style photonic crystal fiber (PCF) filled with argon gas increases over 100 times when the pressure is increased from 1 to 150 bar, reaching 15 % of that of bulk silica glass, while the zero dispersion wavelength shifts from 300 to 900 nm. The group velocity dispersion of the system is uniquely pressure-tunable over a wide range while avoiding Raman scattering : absent in noble gases and having an extremely high optical damage threshold. As a result, detailed and well controlled studies of nonlinear effects can be performed, in both normal and anomalous dispersion regimes, using only a fixed-frequency pump laser. For example, the absence of Raman scattering permits clean observation, at high powers, of the interaction between a modulational instability side-band and a soliton created dispersive wave. Excellent agreement is obtained between numerical simulations and experimental results. The system has great potential for the realisation of reconfigurable supercontinuum sources, wavelength convertors and short-pulse laser systems.
In this letter, an energetic and highly efficient dispersive wave (DW) generation at 200 nm has been numerically demonstrated by selectively exciting LP$_{02}$-like mode in a 10 bar Ar-filled hollow-core anti-resonant fiber pumping in the anomalous dispersion regime at 1030 nm with pulses of 30 fs duration and 7 $mu$J energy. Our calculations indicate high conversion efficiency of $>$35% (2.5 $mu$J) after propagating 3.6 cm fiber length which is due to the strong shock effect and plasma induced blue-shifted soliton. It is observed that the efficiency of fundamental LP$_{01}$-mode is about 15% which is much smaller than LP$_{02}$-like mode and also emitted at longer wavelength of 270 nm.
Transmission of UV light with high beam quality and pointing stability is desirable for many experiments in atomic, molecular and optical physics. In particular, laser cooling and coherent manipulation of trapped ions with transitions in the UV require stable, single-mode light delivery. Transmitting even ~2 mW CW light at 280 nm through silica solid-core fibers has previously been found to cause transmission degradation after just a few hours due to optical damage. We show that photonic crystal fiber of the kagome type can be used for effectively single-mode transmission with acceptable loss and bending sensitivity. No transmission degradation was observed even after >100 hours of operation with 15 mW CW input power. In addition it is shown that implementation of the fiber in a trapped ion experiment significantly increases the coherence times of the internal state transfer due to an increase in beam pointing stability.
We demonstrate that the phase-matched dispersive wave (DW) emission within the resonance band of a 25-cm-long gas-filled hollow-core photonic crystal fiber (HC-PCF) can be strongly enhanced by the photoionization effect of the pump pulse. In the experiments we observe that as the pulse energy increases, the pump pulse gradually shifts to shorter wavelengths due to soliton-plasma interactions. When the central wavelength of the blueshifting soliton is close to the resonance band of the HC-PCF, high-efficiency energy transfer from the pump light to the DW in the visible region can be obtained. During this DW emission process, we also observe that the spectral center of the DW gradually shifts to longer wavelengths leading to a slightly-increased DW bandwidth, which can be well explained as the consequence of phase-matched coupling between the pump pulse and the DW. In particular, at an input pulse energy of 6 uJ, the spectral ratio of the DW at the fiber output is measured to be as high as ~53% together with a conversion efficiency of ~19%. These experimental results, explained by numerical simulations, pave the way to high-brightness light sources based on high-efficiency frequency-upconversion processes in gas-filled HC-PCFs.
We investigate non-diffracting hollow-core nonlinear optical waves propagating in a layered nanoscaled metal-dielectric structure characterized by a very small average linear dielectric permittivity (Nonlinear Epsilon-Near-Zero metamaterial). We analytically show that hollow-core waves have a power flow exactly vanishing at a central region and exhibiting a sharp sloped profile at the edges of the regions surrounding the core. Physically, the absence of power flow at the core region is due to the vanishing of the transverse component of the electric displacement field, condition that can be satisfied by the full compensation between the nonlinear and linear dielectric contribution.