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Seven-octave high-brightness and carrier-envelope-phase-stable light source

Nature Photonics volume 15, pages 277–280 (2021)Cite this article

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Abstract

High-brightness sources of coherent and few-cycle-duration light waveforms with spectral coverage from the ultraviolet to the terahertz would offer unprecedented versatility and opportunities for a wide range of applications from bio-chemical sensing1 to time-resolved and nonlinear spectroscopy, and to attosecond light-wave electronics2,3. Combinations of various sources with frequency conversion4,5 and supercontinuum generation6,7,8,9 can provide relatively large spectral coverage, but many applications require a much broader spectral range10 and low-jitter synchronization for time-domain measurements11. Here, we present a carrier-envelope-phase (CEP)-stable light source, seeded by a mid-infrared frequency comb12,13, with simultaneous spectral coverage across seven optical octaves, from the ultraviolet (340 nm) into the terahertz (40,000 nm). Combining soliton self-compression and dispersive wave generation in an anti-resonant-reflection photonic-crystal fibre with intra-pulse difference frequency generation in BaGa2GeSe6, the spectral brightness is two to five orders of magnitude above that of synchrotron sources. This will enable high-dynamic-range spectroscopies and provide numerous opportunities in attosecond physics and material sciences14,15.

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Fig. 1: Measurement application and layout of the seven-octave coherent light source.
Fig. 2: Pressure dependence of the mid-IR soliton self-compression and DW generation.
Fig. 3: IP-DFG comparison of ZGP, BGGSe and GaSe at 25 bar.
Fig. 4: High-brightness seven-octave few-cycle supercontinuum.

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Data availability

The data that support the plots within this paper and other findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Code availability

The numerical code used in this work will be made available upon reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

J.B. and his group acknowledge financial support from the European Research Council via ERC Advanced Grant ‘TRANSFORMER’ (788218) and ERC Proof of Concept Grant ‘mini-X’ (840010), the European Union’s Horizon 2020 for FET-OPEN ‘PETACom’ (829153), FET-OPEN ‘OPTOlogic’ (899794), Laserlab-Europe (EU-H2020 654148), Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant no. 860553 (‘Smart-X’), MINECO for Plan Nacional FIS2017-89536-P, AGAUR for 2017 SGR 1639, MINECO for ‘Severo Ochoa’ (SEV- 2015-0522), Fundació Cellex Barcelona, CERCA Programme/Generalitat de Catalunya and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Prize. We thank I. Tyulnev and M. Enders for their assistance.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. ICFO – Institut de Ciencies Fotoniques, The Barcelona Institute of Science and Technology, Castelldefels, Barcelona, Spain

    Ugaitz Elu, Luke Maidment, Lenard Vamos & Jens Biegert

  2. Max-Planck Institute for Science of Light, Erlangen, Germany

    Francesco Tani, David Novoa, Michael H. Frosz & Philip St. J. Russell

  3. High Technologies Laboratory, Kuban State University, Krasnodar, Russia

    Valeriy Badikov & Dmitrii Badikov

  4. Max-Born-Institute for Nonlinear Optics and Ultrafast Spectroscopy, Berlin, Germany

    Valentin Petrov

  5. Department of Physics, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität, Erlangen, Germany

    Philip St. J. Russell

  6. ICREA, Barcelona, Spain

    Jens Biegert

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Contributions

J.B. conceived and supervised the project. U.E. performed the experiments and analysed the results with help from L.V. and L.M. V.B., D.B. and V.P. provided the BGGSe crystal. F.T., D.N., M.H.F. and P.St.J.R. provided the ARR-PCF fibre together with experimental support and the simulations of self-compression. L.M. and J.B. wrote the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Jens Biegert.

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Elu, U., Maidment, L., Vamos, L. et al. Seven-octave high-brightness and carrier-envelope-phase-stable light source. Nat. Photonics 15, 277–280 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-020-00735-1

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