Abstract
High-brightness sources of coherent and few-cycle-duration light waveforms with spectral coverage from the ultraviolet to the terahertz would offer unprecedented versatility and opportunities for a wide range of applications from bio-chemical sensing1 to time-resolved and nonlinear spectroscopy, and to attosecond light-wave electronics2,3. Combinations of various sources with frequency conversion4,5 and supercontinuum generation6,7,8,9 can provide relatively large spectral coverage, but many applications require a much broader spectral range10 and low-jitter synchronization for time-domain measurements11. Here, we present a carrier-envelope-phase (CEP)-stable light source, seeded by a mid-infrared frequency comb12,13, with simultaneous spectral coverage across seven optical octaves, from the ultraviolet (340 nm) into the terahertz (40,000 nm). Combining soliton self-compression and dispersive wave generation in an anti-resonant-reflection photonic-crystal fibre with intra-pulse difference frequency generation in BaGa2GeSe6, the spectral brightness is two to five orders of magnitude above that of synchrotron sources. This will enable high-dynamic-range spectroscopies and provide numerous opportunities in attosecond physics and material sciences14,15.
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Data availability
The data that support the plots within this paper and other findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
Code availability
The numerical code used in this work will be made available upon reasonable request.
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Acknowledgements
J.B. and his group acknowledge financial support from the European Research Council via ERC Advanced Grant ‘TRANSFORMER’ (788218) and ERC Proof of Concept Grant ‘mini-X’ (840010), the European Union’s Horizon 2020 for FET-OPEN ‘PETACom’ (829153), FET-OPEN ‘OPTOlogic’ (899794), Laserlab-Europe (EU-H2020 654148), Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant no. 860553 (‘Smart-X’), MINECO for Plan Nacional FIS2017-89536-P, AGAUR for 2017 SGR 1639, MINECO for ‘Severo Ochoa’ (SEV- 2015-0522), Fundació Cellex Barcelona, CERCA Programme/Generalitat de Catalunya and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Prize. We thank I. Tyulnev and M. Enders for their assistance.
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J.B. conceived and supervised the project. U.E. performed the experiments and analysed the results with help from L.V. and L.M. V.B., D.B. and V.P. provided the BGGSe crystal. F.T., D.N., M.H.F. and P.St.J.R. provided the ARR-PCF fibre together with experimental support and the simulations of self-compression. L.M. and J.B. wrote the manuscript.
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Elu, U., Maidment, L., Vamos, L. et al. Seven-octave high-brightness and carrier-envelope-phase-stable light source. Nat. Photonics 15, 277–280 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-020-00735-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-020-00735-1
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