Search Results
Graphene Q-switched Yb:KYW planar waveguide laser
2015, Kim, Jun Wan, Young Choi, Sun, Aravazhi, Shanmugam, Pollnau, Markus, Griebner, Uwe, Petrov, Valentin, Bae, Sukang, Jun Ahn, Kwang, Yeom, Dong-Il, Rotermund, Fabian
A diode-pumped Yb:KYW planar waveguide laser, single-mode Q-switched by evanescent-field interaction with graphene, is demonstrated for the first time. Few-layer graphene grown by chemical vapor deposition is transferred onto the top of a guiding layer, which initiates stable Q-switched operation in a 2.4-cm-long waveguide laser operating near 1027 nm. Average output powers up to 34 mW and pulse durations as short as 349 ns are achieved. The measured output beam profile, clearly exhibiting a single mode, agrees well with the theoretically calculated mode intensity distribution inside the waveguide. As the pump power is increased, the repetition rate and pulse energy increase from 191 to 607 kHz and from 7.4 to 58.6 nJ, respectively, whereas the pulse duration decreases from 2.09 μs to 349 ns.
Supercontinuum generation in a carbon disulfide core microstructured optical fiber
2021, Junaid, Saher, Bierlich, Joerg, Hartung, Alexander, Meyer, Tobias, Chemnitz, Mario, Schmidt, Markus A.
We demonstrate supercontinuum generation in a liquid-core microstructured optical fiber using carbon disulfide as the core material. The fiber provides a specific dispersion landscape with a zero-dispersion wavelength approaching the telecommunication domain where the corresponding capillary-type counterpart shows unsuitable dispersion properties for soliton fission. The experiments were conducted using two pump lasers with different pulse duration (30 fs and 90 fs) giving rise to different non-instantaneous contributions of carbon disulfide in each case. The presented results demonstrate an extraordinary high conversion efficiency from pump to soliton and to dispersive wave, overall defining a platform that enables studying the impact of non-instantaneous responses on ultrafast soliton dynamics and coherence using straightforward pump lasers and diagnostics.
Compact, high-repetition-rate source for broadband sum-frequency generation spectroscopy
2017, Heiner, Zsuzsanna, Petrov, Valentin, Mero, Mark
We present a high-efficiency optical parametric source for broadband vibrational sum-frequency generation (BB-VSFG) for the chemically important mid-infrared spectral range at 2800-3600 cm-1 to study hydrogen bonding interactions affecting the structural organization of biomolecules at water interfaces. The source consists of a supercontinuum-seeded, dual-beam optical parametric amplifier with two broadband infrared output beams and a chirped sum-frequency mixing stage providing narrowband visible pulses with adjustable bandwidth. Utilizing a pulse energy of only 60 μJ from a turn-key, 1.03-μm pump laser operating at a repetition rate of 100 kHz, the source delivers 6-cycle infrared pulses at 1.5 and 3.2 μm with pulse energies of 4.6 and 1.8 μJ, respectively, and narrowband pulses at 0.515 μm with a pulse energy of 5.0 μJ. The 3.2-μm pulses are passively carrier envelope phase stabilized with fluctuations at the 180-mrad level over a 10-s time period. The 1.5-μm beamline can be exploited to deliver pump pulses for time-resolved studies after suitable frequency up-conversion. The high efficiency, stability, and two orders of magnitude higher repetition rate of the source compared to typically employed systems offer great potential for providing a boost in sensitivity in BB-VSFG experiments at a reduced cost.
Compact intense extreme-ultraviolet source
2021, Major, Balázs, Ghafur, Omair, Kovács, Katalin, Varjú, Katalin, Tosa, Valer, Vrakking, Marc J. J., Schütte, B.
High-intensity laser pulses covering the ultraviolet to terahertz spectral regions are nowadays routinely generated in a large number of laboratories. In contrast, intense extreme-ultraviolet (XUV) pulses have only been demonstrated using a small number of sources including free-electron laser facilities [1-3] and long high-harmonic generation (HHG) beamlines [4-9]. Here we demonstrate a concept for a compact intense XUV source based on HHG that is focused to an intensity of $2 \times 10^{14}$ W/cm$^2$, with a potential increase up to $10^{17}$ W/cm$^2$ in the future. Our approach uses tight focusing of the near-infrared (NIR) driving laser and minimizes the XUV virtual source size by generating harmonics several Rayleigh lengths away from the NIR focus. Accordingly, the XUV pulses can be refocused to a small beam waist radius of 600 nm, enabling the absorption of up to four XUV photons by a single Ar atom in a setup that fits on a modest (2 m) laser table. Our concept represents a straightforward approach for the generation of intense XUV pulses in many laboratories, providing novel opportunities for XUV strong-field and nonlinear optics experiments, for XUV-pump XUV-probe spectroscopy and for the coherent diffractive imaging of nanoscale structures.
Electron Population Dynamics in Optically Pumped Asymmetric Coupled Ge/SiGe Quantum Wells: Experiment and Models
2020, Ciano, Chiara, Virgilio, Michele, Bagolini, Luigi, Baldassarre, Leonetta, Rossetti, Andrea, Pashkin, Alexej, Helm, Manfred, Montanari, Michele, Persichetti, Luca, Di Gaspare, Luciana, Capellini, Giovanni, Paul, Douglas J., Scalari, Giacomo, Faist, Jèrome, De Seta, Monica, Ortolani, Michele
n-type doped Ge quantum wells with SiGe barriers represent a promising heterostructure system for the development of radiation emitters in the terahertz range such as electrically pumped quantum cascade lasers and optically pumped quantum fountain lasers. The nonpolar lattice of Ge and SiGe provides electron-phonon scattering rates that are one order of magnitude lower than polar GaAs. We have developed a self-consistent numerical energy-balance model based on a rate equation approach which includes inelastic and elastic inter-and intra-subband scattering events and takes into account a realistic two-dimensional electron gas distribution in all the subband states of the Ge/SiGe quantum wells by considering subband-dependent electronic temperatures and chemical potentials. This full-subband model is compared here to the standard discrete-energy-level model, in which the material parameters are limited to few input values (scattering rates and radiative cross sections). To provide an experimental case study, we have epitaxially grown samples consisting of two asymmetric coupled quantum wells forming a three-level system, which we optically pump with a free electron laser. The benchmark quantity selected for model testing purposes is the saturation intensity at the 1!3 intersubband transition. The numerical quantum model prediction is in reasonable agreement with the experiments and therefore outperforms the discrete-energy-level analytical model, of which the prediction of the saturation intensity is off by a factor 3. © 2019 by the authors.
Sub-15-fs X-ray pump and X-ray probe experiment for the study of ultrafast magnetization dynamics in ferromagnetic alloys
2021, Liu, Xuan, Merhe, Alaaeldine, Jal, Emmanuelle, Delaunay, Renaud, Jarrier, Romain, Chardonnet, Valentin, Hennes, Marcel, Chiuzbaian, Sorin G., Légaré, Katherine, Hennecke, Martin, Radu, Ilie, Von Korff Schmising, Clemens, Grunewald, Særen, Kuhlmann, Marion, Lüning, Jan, Vodungbo, Boris
In this paper, we present a new setup for the measurement of element-specific ultrafast magnetization dynamics in ferromagnetic thin films with a sub-15-fs time resolution. Our experiment relies on a split and delay approach which allows us to fully exploit the shortest X-rays pulses delivered by X-ray Free Electrons Lasers (close to the attosecond range), in an X-ray pump – X-ray probe geometry. The setup performance is demonstrated by measuring the ultrafast elemental response of Ni and Fe during demagnetization of ferromagnetic Ni and Ni80Fe20 (Permalloy) samples upon resonant excitation at the corresponding absorption edges. The transient demagnetization process is measured in both reflection and transmission geometry using, respectively, the transverse magneto-optical Kerr effect (T-MOKE) and the Faraday effect as probing mechanisms.
Terahertz transient stimulated emission from doped silicon
2020, Pavlov, S.G., Deßmann, N., Pohl, A., Zhukavin, R.K., Klaassen, T.O., Abrosimov, N.V., Riemann, H., Redlich, B., Van Der Meer, A.F.G., Ortega, J.-M., Prazeres, R., Orlova, E.E., Muraviev, A.V., Shastin, V.N., Hübers, H.-W.
Transient-type stimulated emission in the terahertz (THz) frequency range has been achieved from phosphorus doped silicon crystals under optical excitation by a few-picosecond-long pulses generated by the infrared free electron lasers FELIX and CLIO. The analysis of the lasing threshold and emission spectra indicates that the stimulated emission occurs due to combined population inversion based lasing and stimulated Raman scattering. Giant gain has been obtained in the optically pumped silicon due to large THz cross sections of intracenter impurity transitions and resonant intracenter electronic scattering. The transient-type emission is formed under conditions when the pump pulse intervals exceed significantly the photon lifetime in the laser resonator. © 2020 Author(s).
43 W, 1.55 μm and 12.5 W, 3.1 μm dual-beam, sub-10 cycle, 100 kHz optical parametric chirped pulse amplifier
2018, Mero, Mark, Heiner, Zsuzsanna, Petrov, Valentin, Rottke, Horst, Branchi, Federico, Thomas, Gabrielle M., Vrakking, Marc J. J.
We present a 100 kHz optical parametric chirped pulse amplifier (OPCPA) developed for strong-field attosecond physics and soft-x-ray transient absorption experiments. The system relies on noncollinear potassium titanyl arsenate booster OPCPAs and is pumped by a 244 W, 1.1 ps Yb:YAG Innoslab chirped pulse laser amplifier. Two optically synchronized infrared output beams are simultaneously available: a 430 μJ, 51 fs, carrier-envelope phase stable beam at 1.55 μm and an angular-dispersion-compensated, 125 μJ, 73 fs beam at 3.1 μm.
The new ultra high-speed all-optical coherent streak-camera
2015, Arkhipov, R.M., Arkhipov, M.V., Egorov, V.S., Chekhonin, I.A., Chekhonin, M.A., Bagayev, S.N.
In the present paper a new type of ultra high-speed all-optical coherent streak-camera was developed. It was shown that a thin resonant film (quantum dots or molecules) could radiate the angular sequence of delayed ultra-short pulses if a transverse spatial periodic distribution of the laser pump field amplitude has a triangle shape.
Attosecond investigation of extreme-ultraviolet multi-photon multi-electron ionization
2022, Kretschmar, M., Hadjipittas, A., Major, B., Tümmler, J., Will, I., Nagy, T., Vrakking, M. J. J., Emmanouilidou, A., Schütte, B.
Multi-electron dynamics in atoms and molecules very often occur on sub- to few-femtosecond time scales. The available intensities of extreme-ultraviolet (XUV) attosecond pulses have previously allowed the time-resolved investigation of two-photon, two-electron interactions. Here we study double and triple ionization of argon atoms involving the absorption of up to five XUV photons using a pair of intense attosecond pulse trains (APTs). By varying the time delay between the two APTs with attosecond precision and the spatial overlap with nanometer precision, we obtain information on complex nonlinear multi-photon ionization pathways. Our experimental and numerical results show that Ar2+ is predominantly formed by a sequential two-photon process, whereas the delay dependence of the Ar3+ ion yield exhibits clear signatures of the involvement of a simultaneous two-photon absorption process. Our experiment suggests that it is possible to investigate multi-electron dynamics using attosecond pulses for both pumping and probing the dynamics.