Ultrafast circularly polarized pulses tunable from the vacuum to deep ultraviolet

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates the generation of tunable, circularly polarized ultrafast pulses from the vacuum ultraviolet to deep ultraviolet using gas-filled hollow capillary fibers, with potential for even shorter pulses.

Contribution

It introduces a method for producing circularly polarized ultrafast pulses across a broad UV spectrum via resonant dispersive wave emission in gas-filled fibers, extending previous linear polarization techniques.

Findings

Achieved up to 13 microjoules of pulse energy in the deep UV.

Estimated shortest pulse duration of 8.5 femtoseconds from simulations.

Scaling pulse energy by 3/2 reproduces soliton and dispersive wave dynamics.

Abstract

We experimentally demonstrate the efficient generation of circularly polarized pulses tunable from the vacuum to deep ultraviolet (160-380 nm) through resonant dispersive wave emission from optical solitons in a gas-filled hollow capillary fiber. In the deep ultraviolet we measure up to 13 microjoule of pulse energy, and from numerical simulations, we estimate the shortest output pulse duration to be 8.5 fs. We also experimentally verify that simply scaling the pulse energy by 3/2 between linearly and circularly polarized pumping closely reproduces the soliton and dispersive wave dynamics. Based on previous results with linearly polarized self-compression and resonant dispersive wave emission, we expect our technique to be extended to produce circularly polarized few-fs pulses further into the vacuum ultraviolet, and few to sub-fs circularly polarized pulses in the near-infrared.