Abstract

Yb-based femtotsecond (fs) thin-disk (TD) oscillators, fibre and innoslab amplifiers, resp. generate laser pulses with μJ energies and durations of several hundreds of fs. A key challenge of these rapidly developing laser systems is to efficiently compress their output to only a few optical cycles to enable applications which involve extremely nonlinear effects like attosecond pulse generation at MHz repetition rates or XUV frequency comb spectroscopy. Spectral broadening in bulk material has proven to be capable of producing few-cycle pulses with good beam quality [1,2] and thus the method manifests itself as a favourable alternative to fibre-based broadening techniques due its robustness, alignment-insensitivity and low costs. This work demonstrates efficient spectral broadening with 250 fs and 53 fs input pulses in bulk material.

© 2015 IEEE