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High-energy pulse synthesis with sub-cycle waveform control for strong-field physics

Nature Photonics volume 5, pages 475–479 (2011)Cite this article

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Abstract

Over the last decade, control of atomic-scale electronic motion by non-perturbative optical fields has broken tremendous new ground with the advent of phase-controlled high-energy few-cycle pulse sources1. The development of close to single-cycle, carrier-envelope phase controlled, high-energy optical pulses has already led to isolated attosecond EUV pulse generation2, expanding ultrafast spectroscopy to attosecond resolution1. However, further investigation and control of these physical processes requires sub-cycle waveform shaping, which has not been achievable to date. Here, we present a light source, using coherent wavelength multiplexing, that enables sub-cycle waveform shaping with a two-octave-spanning spectrum and a pulse energy of 15 µJ. It offers full phase control and allows generation of any optical waveform supported by the amplified spectrum. Both energy and bandwidth scale linearly with the number of sub-modules, so the peak power scales quadratically. The demonstrated system is the prototype of a class of novel optical tools for attosecond control of strong-field physics experiments.

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Figure 1: Schematic of the high-energy optical waveform synthesizer.
Figure 2: Characterization of the synthesized pulses.
Figure 3: The synthesized electric-field waveforms.
Figure 4: Extreme nonlinear optics with sub-cycle manipulated waveforms.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (grants FA9550-09-1-0212, FA8655-09-1-3101 and FA9550-10-1-0063) and by Progetto Roberto Rocca.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science and Research Laboratory of Electronics, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, 02139, Massachusetts, USA

    Shu-Wei Huang, Giovanni Cirmi, Jeffrey Moses, Kyung-Han Hong, Siddharth Bhardwaj, Jonathan R. Birge, Li-Jin Chen & Franz X. Kärtner

  2. Centre for Ultrahigh Bandwidth Devices for Optical Systems, Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence, School of Physics, University of Sydney, 2006, NSW, Australia

    Enbang Li & Benjamin J. Eggleton

  3. Dipartimento di Fisica, IFN-CNR, Politecnico di Milano, Piazza L. Da Vinci 32, Milano, 20133, Italy

    Giulio Cerullo

  4. DESY-Center for Free-Electron Laser Science and Hamburg University, Notkestraße 85, Hamburg, D-22607, Germany

    Franz X. Kärtner

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  1. Shu-Wei Huang
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Contributions

F.X.K., K.H.H., J.M. and S.W.H. conceived the experiment, and carried it out together with G.Ce. and G.Ci.; S.B. provided the TDSE simulation and the spectrogram analysis; J.R.B. provided critical discussion on 2DSI; L.J.C. provided critical help and discussion on the Ti:sapphire oscillator; E.L. and B.J.E. provided the chirped fibre Bragg grating; S.W.H., G.Ci., K.H.H., J.M., F.X.K. and G.Ce. co-wrote the paper. F.X.K. is the senior author of the group and supervised the work.

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Correspondence to Franz X. Kärtner.

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The authors declare no competing financial interests.

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Huang, SW., Cirmi, G., Moses, J. et al. High-energy pulse synthesis with sub-cycle waveform control for strong-field physics. Nature Photon 5, 475–479 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2011.140

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