Pulse compression and multimegawatt optical solitons in hollow photonic-crystal fibers

Solitonic phenomena in hollow photonic-crystal fibers are shown to offer new solutions for the control, transmission, and spectral-temporal transformation of ultrashort high-power laser pulses. With the initial parameters of laser radiation accurately matched with fiber dispersion and nonlinearity, submicrojoule laser pulses are shown to exhibit a self-compression and soliton dynamics in the regime of anomalous dispersion. Regimes of solitonic pulse evolution giving rise to few-cycle field waveforms are demonstrated. Based on simple arguments of soliton theory, we derive semiempirical relations providing interesting insights into the minimum pulse width of the laser field in a hollow photonic-crystal fiber as a function of the input laser energy.