English

High-power femtosecond mid-IR source with tunable center frequency and chirp

Optics 2024-08-27 v1

Abstract

We present an experimental implementation of a chirped mid-infrared (mid-IR) high-power laser source with variable center frequency between 4 THz to 30 THz and continuously tunable frequency sweep of up to 20 % within one pulse, with a pulse duration of 2 ps. The peak electric field obtained at 4 THz is 1.5 MV/cm. We generate the mid-IR light using a difference-frequency generation (DFG) process with two phase-locked, chirped IR pulses. The obtained mid-IR electric field waveform is characterized using electro-optic sampling. We compare our experimental results with the predictions of numerical simulations. The results indicate the potential for efficient driving of vibrational modes into a strongly anharmomic regime, in cases where using Fourier-transform-limited pulses to achieve similar vibrational amplitudes would lead to dielectric breakdown.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2408.13583,
  title  = {High-power femtosecond mid-IR source with tunable center frequency and chirp},
  author = {Larissa Boie and Benjamin H. Strudwick and Rafael T. Winkler and Yunpei Deng and Steven L. Johnson},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2408.13583},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

13 pages, 5 figures