Journal
SCIENCE ADVANCES
Volume 6, Issue 34, Pages -Publisher
AMER ASSOC ADVANCEMENT SCIENCE
DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.abb5375
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Funding
- U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Office of Science, Basic Energy Sciences (BES) [DE-SC0019291]
- Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) [FA9550-16-1-0149, FA9550-15-1-0037]
- UCF College of Graduate Studies
- Central Florida Physics Research Exchange Program
- National Science Foundation (NSF) [PHY-1707237]
- U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR) [FA9550-18-1-0223]
- Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) [D18AC00011]
- U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) [DE-SC0019291] Funding Source: U.S. Department of Energy (DOE)
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The field of attosecond science was first enabled by nonlinear compression of intense laser pulses to a duration below two optical cycles. Twenty years later, creating such short pulses still requires state-of-the-art few-cycle laser amplifiers to most efficiently exploit instantaneousoptical nonlinearities in noble gases for spectral broadening and parametric frequency conversion. Here, we show that nonlinear compression can be much more efficient when driven in molecular gases by pulses substantially longer than a few cycles because of enhanced optical nonlinearity associated with rotational alignment. We use 80-cycle pulses from an industrial-grade laser amplifier to simultaneously drive molecular alignment and supercontinuum generation in a gas-filled capillary, producing more than two octaves of coherent bandwidth and achieving >45-fold compression to a duration of 1.6 cycles. As the enhanced nonlinearity is linked to rotational motion, the dynamics can be exploited for long-wavelength frequency conversion and compressing picosecond lasers.
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