An official website of the United States government
Here’s how you know
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock (
) or https:// means you’ve safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.
A six-octave optical frequency comb from a scalable few-cycle Erbium fiber laser
Published
Author(s)
Daniel Lesko, Henry R. Timmers, Sida Xing, Abijith S. Kowligy, Alexander Lind, Scott Diddams
Abstract
A coherent, compact and robust light source with coverage from the ultraviolet to the infrared is desirable for heterodyne super-resolution imaging1, broadband infrared microscopy2, protein structure determination3 and standoff trace-gas detection4. To address these demanding problems, frequency combs5 combine absolute frequency accuracy with sub-femtosecond timing and waveform control to enable high-resolution, high-speed and broadband spectroscopy6,7,8,9. Here we demonstrate a scalable source of near-single-cycle pulses from robust and low-noise erbium fibre (Er:fibre) technology. With a peak power of 0.56 MW we generate a comb spanning six octaves, from the ultraviolet (350 nm) to the mid-infrared (22,500 nm), achieving a resolving power of 1010 across 0.86 PHz of bandwidth. Second-order nonlinearities in LiNbO3, GaSe and CdSiP2 provide phase-stable infrared ultrashort pulses with simultaneous brightness exceeding a synchrotron10, while cascaded nonlinearities in LiNbO3 yield four octaves simultaneously (0.350–5.6 μm). We anticipate that these advances will be enabling for basic and applied spectroscopy, microscopy and phase-sensitive nonlinear optics.
Lesko, D.
, Timmers, H.
, Xing, S.
, Kowligy, A.
, Lind, A.
and Diddams, S.
(2021),
A six-octave optical frequency comb from a scalable few-cycle Erbium fiber laser, Nature Photonics, [online], https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-021-00778-y
(Accessed December 11, 2024)