Extreme self-compression along with superbroad spectrum up-conversion of few-cycle optical solitons in the ionization regime

A regime of extreme self-compression of optical solitons to single-cycle duration with further shortening along with superbroad spectrum up-shifting is revealed when the Kerr nonlinearity and ionization process are independently controlled. This results in efficient optical-pulse compression as a whole towards extremely short single-cycle pulses at essentially shorter wavelengths, which may open a new way to generate optical pulses with durations of hundreds of attoseconds in the ultraviolet domain.