Compression of ultrashort UV pulses in a self-defocusing gas
Optics
2010-02-03 v1 Plasma Physics
Abstract
Compression of UV femtosecond laser pulses focused into a gas cell filled with xenon is reported numerically. With a large negative Kerr index and normal dispersion, xenon promotes temporal modulational instability (MI) which can be monitored to shorten ~ 100 fs pulses to robust, singly-peaked waveforms exhibiting a fourfold compression factor. Combining standard MI theory with a variational approach allows us to predict the beam parameters suitable for efficient compression. At powers < 30 MW, nonlinear dispersion is shown to shift the pulse temporal profile to the rear zone.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.0910.0944,
title = {Compression of ultrashort UV pulses in a self-defocusing gas},
author = {L. Berge and C. Koehler and S. Skupin},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0910.0944},
year = {2010}
}
Comments
4 pages, 4 figures