Few-optical-cycle light pulses with passive carrier-envelope phase stabilization

One of the most advanced frontiers of ultrafast optics is the control of carrier-envelope phase (CEP) phi of light pulses, which enables the generation of optical waveforms with reproducible electric field profile. Such control is important for pulses with few-optical-cycle duration, for which a CEP variation produces a strong change in the waveform, so that strongly nonlinear optical phenomena, such as multiphoton absorption, above-threshold ionization and high-harmonic generation become CEP-dependent. In particular, CEP control is the prerequisite for the production of isolated attosecond pulses. Standard laser systems generate pulses that are CEP unstable; the CEP can be stabilized using either active or passive methods. Passive, all-optical schemes rely on difference-frequency generation (DFG) between two pulses sharing the same CEP: in this process the phases of the two pulses add up with opposite signs, leading to cancellation of the shot-to-shot CEP fluctuations. This paper presents an overview of passive CEP stabilization schemes, starting from the basic concepts and progressing to the details of the practical implementations of the idea. The passive approach allows the generation of CEP-controlled few-optical-cycle pulses covering a very broad range of parameters in terms of carrier frequency (from visible to mid-IR), energy (up to several mJs) and repetition rate (up to hundreds of kHz).