Soliton Compression in a Multipass Cell

Summary form only given. The development of mid-IR high repetition rate laser systems with a pulse duration in the few-cycle regime is driven by applications such as high harmonic generation [1,2] and multidimensional molecular spectroscopy [3]. Optical parametric chirped pulse amplification (OPCPA) seems to be a suitable technology to meet the requirements of these applications, but reaching the few cycle regime directly is challenging. One way to achieve shorter pulse duration is to implement a nonlinear compression stage at the output of the system. We report on a soliton compression experiment performed at the output of an OPCPA system operating at a central wavelength of 1550 nm. It is implemented using a multipass cell (MPC) [4] that includes a plate of silica, in which self-phase modulation together with anomalous dispersion progressively induce self-compression. This geometry allows retaining temporal nonlinearities while homogenizing the spatial Kerr effect, and is energy scalable.