High-energy mid-infrared sub-cycle pulse synthesis from a parametric amplifier

• Main Authors: Wang, Zhou (Author), Park, Hyunwook (Author), Zawilski, Kevin (Author), Schunemann, Peter (Author), DiMauro, Louis F. (Author), Liang, Houkun (Contributor), Krogen, Peter Ra (Contributor), Kroh, Tobias (Contributor), Moses, Jeffrey A. (Contributor), Kaertner, Franz X (Contributor), Hong, Kyung-Han (Contributor)
• Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (Contributor), Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Research Laboratory of Electronics (Contributor)
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Nature Publishing Group, 2017-12-12T16:54:50Z.
• Subjects: Article
• Online Access: Get fulltext

 High-energy phase-stable sub-cycle mid-infrared pulses can provide unique opportunities to explore phase-sensitive strong-field light-matter interactions in atoms, molecules and solids. At the mid-infrared wavelength, the Keldysh parameter could be much smaller than unity even at relatively modest laser intensities, enabling the study of the strong-field sub-cycle electron dynamics in solids without damage. Here we report a high-energy sub-cycle pulse synthesiser based on a mid-infrared optical parametric amplifier and its application to high-harmonic generation in solids. The signal and idler combined spectrum spans from 2.5 to 9.0 μm. We coherently synthesise the passively carrier-envelope phase-stable signal and idler pulses to generate 33 μJ, 0.88-cycle, multi-gigawatt pulses centred at ~4.2 μm, which is further energy scalable. The mid-infrared sub-cycle pulse is used for driving high-harmonic generation in thin silicon samples, producing harmonics up to ~19th order with a continuous spectral coverage due to the isolated emission by the sub-cycle driver.