No Arabic abstract
Gas-filled hollow-core photonic crystal fiber (PCF) is used for efficient nonlinear temporal compression of femtosecond laser pulses, two main schemes being direct soliton-effect self-compression, and spectral broadening followed by phase compensation. To obtain stable compressed pulses, it is crucial to avoid decoherence through modulational instability (MI) during spectral broadening. Here we show that changes in dispersion due to spectral anti-crossings between the fundamental core mode and core wall resonances in anti-resonant-guiding hollow-core PCF can strongly alter the MI gain spectrum, enabling MI-free pulse compression for optimized fiber designs. In addition, higher-order dispersion can introduce MI even when the pump pulses lie in the normal dispersion region.
We report generation of ultrashort UV pulses by soliton self-compression in kagome-style hollow-core photonic crystal fiber filled with ambient air. Pump pulses with energy 2.6 uJ and duration 54 fs at 400 nm were compressed temporally by a factor of 5, to a duration of ~11 fs. The experimental results are supported by numerical simulations, showing that both Raman and Kerr effects play a role in the compression dynamics. The convenience of using ambient air, and the absence of glass windows that would distort the compressed pulses, makes the setup highly attractive as the basis of an efficient table-top UV pulse compressor.
We present a technique that uses noisy broadband pulse bursts generated by modulational instability to probe nonlinear processes, including infrared-inactive Raman transitions, in molecular gases. These processes imprint correlations between different regions of the noisy spectrum, which can be detected by acquiring single shot spectra and calculating the Pearson correlation coefficient between the different frequency components. Numerical simulations verify the experimental measurements and are used to further understand the system and discuss methods to improve the signal strength and the spectral resolution of the technique.
We report a series of experimental, analytical and numerical studies demonstrating strong circular dichroism in helically twisted hollow-core single-ring photonic crystal fiber (SR-PCF), formed by spinning the preform during fiber drawing. In the SR-PCFs studied, the hollow core is surrounded by a single ring of non-touching capillaries. Coupling between these capillaries results in the formation of helical Bloch modes carrying orbital angular momentum. In the twisted fiber, strong circular birefringence appears in the ring, so that when a core mode with a certain circular polarization state (say LC) phase-matches to the ring, the other (RC) is strongly dephased. If in addition the orbital angular momentum is the same in core and ring, and the polarization states are non-orthogonal (e.g., slightly elliptical), the LC core mode will experience high loss while the RC mode is efficiently transmitted. The result is a single-circular-polarization SR-PCF that acts as a circular polarizer over a certain wavelength range. Such fibers have many potential applications, for example, for generating circularly polarized light in gas-filled SR-PCF and realizing polarizing elements in the deep and vacuum ultraviolet.
We demonstrate a route to supercontinuum generation in gas-filled hollow-core anti-resonant fibers through the creation of a broad vibrational Raman frequency comb followed by continuous broadening and merging of the comb lines through either rotational Raman scattering or the optical Kerr effect. Our demonstration experiments, utilizing a single pump pulse with 20 ps duration at 532 nm in a nitrogen-filled fiber, produce a supercontinuum spanning from 440 nm to 1200 nm, with an additional deep ultraviolet continuum from 250 nm to 360 nm. Numerical results suggest that this approach can produce even broader supercontinuum spectra extending from the ultraviolet to mid-infrared.
The resonance band in hollow-core photonic crystal fiber (HC-PCF), while leading to high-loss region in the fiber transmission spectrum, has been successfully used for generating phase-matched dispersive wave (DW). Here, we report that the spectral width of the resonance-induced DW can be largely broadened due to plasma-driven blueshifting soliton. In the experiment, we observed that in a short length of Ar-filled single-ring HC-PCF the soliton self-compression and photoionization effects caused a strong spectral blueshift of the pump pulse, changing the phase-matching condition of the DW emission process. Therefore, broadening of DW spectrum to the longer-wavelength side was obtained with several spectral peaks, which correspond to the generation of DW at different positions along the fiber. In the simulation, we used super-Gauss windows with different central wavelengths to filter out these DW spectral peaks, and studied the time-domain characteristics of these peaks respectively using Fourier transform method. The simulation results verified that these multiple-peaks on the DW spectrum have different delays in the time domain, agreeing well with our theoretical prediction. Remarkably, we found that the whole time-domain DW trace can be compressed to ~29 fs using proper chirp compensation. The experimental and numerical results reported here provide some insight into the resonance-induced DW generation process in gas-filled HC-PCFs, they could also pave the way to ultrafast pulse generation using DW-emission mechanism.