The gas-filled hollow-core fiber compression and the optical filamentation technique are compared experimentally in a parameter regime suitable for intense few-cycle pulse generation. In particular, pointing stability, spectral properties, and spatial chirp are investigated. It is found that in the case of filamentation, the critical parameter for pointing stability is gas pressure inside the g...

Self-compression of multi-millijoule femtosecond laser pulses and dramatic increase of the peak intensity are found in pressurized helium and neon within a range of intensity in which the ionization modification of the material parameters by the pulse is negligible. The pulse propagation is studied by the (3+1)-dimensional nonlinear Schrodinger equation including basic lowest order optical proc...

We present an initial feasibility summary of a femtosecond synchrotron radiation x-ray source based on a flat-beam rf gun and a recirculating superconducting linac that provides beam to an array of undulators and bend magnets. Optical pulse durations of <100 fs are obtained by a combination of electron pulse compression, transverse temporal correlation of the electrons, and x-ray pulse compress...

We demonstrate a compact pulse compression scheme that offers flexible chirp control for improved conversion efficiencies in high resolution nonlinear optical microscopy. An Er:fiber laser combined with a highly nonlinear optical fiber yields pulses centered at 1100 nm with a bandwidth of 500 nm. The compressed pulses with a duration of 7.6 fs enable simultaneous second-harmonic generation, thi...

nanocomposite materials, including noble metal nanoparticles embedded in a dielectric host medium, are interesting because of their optical properties linked to surface plasmon resonance phenomena. for studding of nonlinear optical properties and/or energy transfer process, these materials may be excited by ultrashort pulse laser with a temporal width varying from some femtoseconds to some hund...

In this paper performance enhancement in PA measurements through optical pulse shaping is explored and demonstrated. A recently introduced setup, which is based on a CW tunable laser source operating in the optical communications band (1510-1620nm) and an electro-optic modulator, offers exceptional flexibility in controlling the temporal and spectral characteristics of the excitation waveform. ...

We present an amplification medium for optical parametric chirped-pulse amplification that allows for ultrabroadband gain in a collinear configuration. Our approach is based on aperiodic quasi-phase-matching (QPM). For the first demonstration of this method in a mid-IR optical parametric chirped-pulse amplifier, we chose a QPM grating design with a linear chirp of its associated spatial frequen...

In order to avoid laser-induced damage to optical components during amplification of a short laser pulse, the pulse often is first stretched in time to reduce its peak power, amplified, and then recompressed. High peak irradiance is attained when the laser beam is subsequently focused onto a laser fusion target. In a laser system, currently under construction, large diffraction gratings will be...

For next-generation optical networks, it is expected that transmission capacity will be increased by making high channel density and wide band WDM systems, and increasing data bitrate per wavelength channel. The high bitrate per channel system has great potential for cost reductions in comparison with wide broaden DWDM systems of the same transmission capacity, because of a fewer number of chan...

In this work, the propagation of solitons in single-mode optical fibers has been investigated theoretically by using the nonlinear Schrödinger equation. This equation combines the effects of group velocity dispersion and self-phase modulation present in optical fibers and also takes into account the loss of optical fiber. The nonlinear Schrödinger equation has been solved numerically by using t...