Sub-50 fs pulses at 2050 nm from a picosecond Ho:YLF laser using a two-stage Kagome-fiber-based compressor

The high-energy few-cycle mid-infrared laser pulse beyond 2 mu m is of immense importance for attosecond science and strong-field physics. However, the limited gain bandwidth of laser crystals such as Ho:YLF and Ho:YAG allows the generation of picosecond (ps) long pulses and, hence, makes it challenging to generate few-cycle pulse at 2 mu m without utilizing an optical parametric chirped-pulse amplifier (OPCPA). Moreover, the exclusive use of the near-infrared wavelength has limited the generation of wavelengths beyond 4 mu m (OPCPA). Furthermore, high harmonic generation (HHG) conversion efficiency reduces dramatically when driven by a long-wavelength laser. Novel schemes such as multi-color HHG have been proposed to enhance the harmonic flux. Therefore, it is highly desirable to generate few-cycle to femtosecond pulses from a 2 mu m laser for driving these experiments. Here, we utilize two-stage nonlinear spectral broadening and pulse compression based on the Kagome-type hollow-core photonic crystal fiber (HC-PCF) to compress few-ps pulses to sub-50 fs from a Ho:YLF amplifier at 2 mu m at 1 kHz repetition rate. We demonstrate both experimentally and numerically the compression of 3.3 ps at 140 mu J pulses to 48 fs at 11 mu J with focal intensity reaching 10(13) W/cm(2). Thereby, this system can be used for driving HHG in solids at 2 mu m. In the first stage, the pulses are spectrally broadened in Kagome fiber and compressed in a silicon-based prism compressor to 285 fs at a pulse energy of 90 mu J. In the second stage, the 285 fs pulse is self-compressed in air-filled HC-PCF. With fine-tuning of the group delay dispersion (GDD) externally in a 3 mm window, a compressed pulse of 48 fs is achieved. This leads to a 70-fold compression of the ps pulses at 2050 nm. We further used the sub-50 fs laser pulses to generate white light by focusing the pulse into a thin medium of YAG. (C) 2022 Chinese Laser Press