Generation of few optical cycles in air-silica nanowires

摘要

Air-silica nanowires present suitable waveguides to enhance nonlinearities and generate cyclical temporal compression and broadband supercontinuum (SC) in only few millimeters length. We report on the generation of few optical cycles in air-silica nanowires with core diameters ranging from 400 nm to 900 nm. We show that it is possible to shift the zero dispersion wavelengths toward a wavelength of about 470 nm. We demonstrate that soliton self-compression of low-energy 100 fs input pulse down to 1.94 fs is possible by pumping in the anomalous dispersion regime a 570 μm-long 700 nm-core diameter air-silica nanowire. We achieve a very high temporal compression ratio of 51.55 from 100 fs to less than single optical cycle. We obtain broadband supercontinuum spanning from 260 nm to 1500 nm. By adding one photon per mode noise with a random phase, a very high degree of coherence over the entire generated supercontinuum bandwidth is shown.