Scalable hollow fiber pulse compressor for NIR and UV lasers

International audienceWe report on several ultra-short pulse compression schemes based on hollow-core photonic crystal fiber filled with a chosen gas-phase medium and undertaken in a versatile module coined "FastLas". The scheme relies on dispersion management by both fiber design and gas pressure management to offer a highly versatile pulse compressor. Furthermore, the gas is also used to set the required optical nonlinearity. This type of hollow fiber based compressor is scalable with the laser wavelength, pulse energy and initial pulse-width. Among the achieved pulse compression, we list a self-compression of 500-600 fs ultra-short pulse Yb-laser and with energy range of 10-500 µJ. By simply scaling the fiber length we demonstrated pulses as short as ~20 fs for the whole energy range. Here, the self-compression is achieved through solitonic dynamic. Conversely, we demonstrated pulse compression based on self-phase modulation by adjusting the fiber and gas dispersion. Among the pulse compressors we have developed, based on self-phase modulation, we cite the compression of a frequency-tripled micro-Joule pulse-energy Yb-laser with a pulse width of 250 fs. The results show compressed UVpulses with temporal width in the range of 50-60 fs