Few-cycle Pulse Generation using Bulk Multi-pass Cells

Sammanfattning

Few-cycle laser pulses are fundamental for tracking ultrashort motions such as electron dynamics and achieving stronger fields. They are also extensively used to perform high-harmonic generation and in attosecond science. However, generating stable and high quality few-cycle pulses requires a simultaneous control of bandwidth and dispersion. The generation of few-cycle pulses in an efficient manner is also quite challenging. This thesis looks into the generation of few-cycle pulses through a cascaded multi-pass cell post-compression scheme. The system consists of a two-stage multi-pass cell setup with bulk fused silica as the nonlinear medium. The tasks for this project were focused on the second stage where special attention was set on the dispersion management using chirped mirrors within the cavity and compression stage as well as further material placement for higher-orders of dispersion compensation. Using the entire setup, a total compression from 220 fs to 6.2 fs was achieved rendering a total compression factor of 34.5 providing a few-cycle laser pulse with good spatial quality. The results from this project aim towards proving the worth of cascaded bulk multi-pass cells systems for pulse compression, providing a stable, robust and energy-scalable setup for the generation of few-cycle laser pulses that can be further used for high-harmonic generation.