Backward stimulated Raman scattering in gases provides a promising route to compression and amplification of a Stokes seed-pulse by counter-propagating against a pump-pulse, as has been already demonstrated in various platforms, mainly in free-space. However, the dynamics governing this process when seeded by noise has not yet been investigated in a fully controllable collinear environment. Here we report the first unambiguous observation of efficient noise-seeded backward stimulated Raman scattering in a hydrogen-filled hollow-core photonic crystal fiber. At high gas pressures, when the backward Raman gain is comparable with, but lower than, the forward gain, we report quantum conversion efficiencies exceeding 40% to the backward Stokes at 683 nm from a narrowband 532-nm-pump. The efficiency increases to 65% when the backward process is seeded by a small amount of back-reflected forward-generated Stokes light. At high pump powers the backward Stokes signal, emitted in a clean fundamental mode and spectrally pure, is unexpectedly always stronger than its forward-propagating counterpart. We attribute this striking observation to the unique temporal dynamics of the interacting fields, which cause the Raman coherence (which takes the form of a moving fine-period Bragg grating) to grow in strength towards the input end of the fiber. A good understanding of this process, together with the rapid development of novel anti-resonant-guiding hollow-core fibers, may lead to improved designs of efficient gas-based Raman lasers and amplifiers operating at wavelengths from the ultraviolet to the mid-infrared.
We demonstrate sensitive high-resolution stimulated Raman measurements of hydrogen using a hollow-core photonic crystal fiber (HC-PCF). The Raman transition is pumped by a narrow linewidth (<50 kHz) 1064 nm continuous-wave (CW) fiber laser. The probe light is produced by a homebuilt CW optical parametric oscillator (OPO), tunable from around 800 nm to 1300 nm (linewidth ~ 5 MHz). These narrow linewidth lasers allow for an excellent spectral resolution of approximately 10^-4 cm^(-1). The setup employs a differential measurement technique for noise rejection in the probe beam, which also elimina…
Hollow core fibers are considered as promising candidates to deliver intense temporally overlapping picosecond pulses in applications such as stimulated Raman scattering (SRS) microscopy and endoscopy because of their inherent low nonlinearity compared to solid-core silica fibers. Here we demonstrate that, contrary to prior assumptions, parasitic signals are generated in Kagomé lattice hollow core fibers. We identify the origin of the parasitic signals as an interplay between the Kerr nonlinearity of air and frequency-dependent fiber losses. Importantly, we identify the special cases of experi…
Hydrogen detection is of great importance in chemical and energy industries. Optical fiber hydrogen sensors show flexibility and compactness and have the potential for distributed analysis. However, traditional fiber sensors encounter a challenge for light to interact with hydrogen directly since hydrogen only display weak quadrupole absorption, and metallic palladium and platinum thin-film coatings are typically used as an optically detectable label. Here, based on stimulated Raman spectroscopy in hollow-core photonic crystal fibers, we investigate the label-free optical fiber distributed hyd…
In this letter, we present a high pulse energy Raman laser at 1946 nm wavelength directly pumped with a 1533 nm custom-made fiber laser. The Raman laser is based on the stimulated Raman scattering (SRS) in an 8-meter carbon dioxide (CO2) filled nested anti-resonant hollow-core fiber (ARHCF). The low energy phonon emission combined with the inherent SRS process along the low-loss fiber allows the generation of high pulse energy up to 15.4 μJ at atmospheric CO2 pressure. The Raman laser exhibits good long-term stability and low relative intensity noise (RIN) of less than 4%. We also investigate …
Many reports on stimulated Raman scattering in mixtures of Raman-active and noble gases indicate that the addition of a dispersive buffer gas increases the phase-mismatch to higher-order Stokes and antiStokes sidebands, resulting in preferential conversion to the first few Stokes lines, accompanied by a significant reduction in Raman gain due to collisions with buffer gas molecules. Here we report that, provided the dispersion can be precisely controlled, the effective Raman gain in gas-filled hollow-core photonic crystal fiber (PCF) can actually be significantly enhanced when a buffer gas is …
Stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) offers among the highest nonlinear gains in solid materials and has demonstrated advanced photonics functionalities in waveguides. The large compressibility of gases suggests that SBS may gain in efficiency with respect to condensed materials. Here, by using a gas-filled hollow-core fibre at high pressure, we achieve a strong Brillouin amplification per unit length, exceeding by 6 times the gain observed in fibres with a solid silica core. This large amplification benefits from a higher molecular density and a lower acoustic attenuation at higher pressure,…
We observe competition between the modulation instability (MI) and stimulated Brillouin scattering (SBS) in a 9.2-GHz broadband SBS slow light device, in which a standard 20-km-long single-mode LEAF fibre is used as the SBS medium. We find that MI is dominant and depletes most of the pump power when we use an intense pump beam at ~1.55 μm, where the LEAF fibre is anomalously dispersive. The dominance of the MI in the LEAF-fibre-based system suppresses the SBS gain, degrading the SBS slow light delay and limiting the SBS gain-bandwidth to 126 dB \cdot GHz. In a dispersion-shifted highly nonline…
As shown in the early 1960s, the gain in stimulated Raman scattering (SRS) is drastically suppressed when the rate of creation of phonons (via pump-to-Stokes conversion) is exactly balanced by the rate of phonon annihilation (via pump-to-anti-Stokes conversion). This occurs when the phonon coherence waves synchronized vibrations of a large population of molecules have identical propagation constants for both processes, i.e., they are phase-velocity matched. As recently demonstrated, hydrogen-filled photonic crystal fiber pumped in the vicinity of its zero dispersion wavelength provides an idea…
Coherent ultraviolet (UV) light has many uses, for example in the study of molecular species relevant in biology and chemistry. Very few if any laser materials offer UV transparency along with damage-free operation at high photon energies and laser power. Here we report efficient generation of deep and vacuum UV light using hydrogen-filled hollow-core photonic crystal fiber (HC-PCF). Pumping above the stimulated Raman threshold at 532 nm, coherent molecular vibrations are excited in the gas, permitting highly efficient thresholdless wavelength conversion in the UV. The system is uniquely press…
Here we identify a new form of optomechanical coupling in gas-filled hollow-core fibers. Stimulated forward Brillouin scattering is observed in air in the core of a photonic bandgap fiber. A single resonance is observed at 35 MHz, which corresponds to the first excited axial-radial acoustic mode in the air-filled core. The linewidth and coupling strengths are determined by the acoustic loss and electrostrictive coupling in air, respectively. A simple analytical model, refined by numerical simulations, is developed that accurately predicts the Brillouin coupling strength and frequency from the …
Many fields such as bio-spectroscopy and photochemistry often require sources of vacuum ultraviolet (VUV) pulses featuring a narrow linewidth and tunable over a wide frequency range. However, the majority of available VUV light sources do not simultaneously fulfill those two requirements, and few if any are truly compact, cost-effective and easy to use by non-specialists. Here we introduce a novel approach that goes a long way to meeting this challenge. It is based on hydrogen-filled hollow-core photonic crystal fiber pumped simultaneously by two spectrally distant pulses. Stimulated Raman sca…
We report on experimental and theoretical demonstration of an optical comb spectrum based on a combination of cascaded stimulated Raman scattering and four-wave mixing mediated by Raman-induced nonresonant Kerr-type nonlinearity. This combination enabled to transform a conventional quasi-periodic Raman comb into a comb with a single and smaller frequency spacing. This new phenomenon is realized using a hollow-core photonic crystal fiber filled with 40 bars of deuterium, and pumped with a high-power picosecond laser. The resultant comb shows more than 100 spectral lines spanning over 220 THz fr…
Oblique Bragg-Doppler scattering at relativistic grating created by backward Raman amplification in hydrogen
Russell Centre for Advanced Lightwave Science, Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics and Hangzhou Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics, Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS)（中国科学院上海光学精密机械研究所杭州分院）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Zhejiang Key Laboratory of Microstructured Specialty Optical Fiber, Hangzhou Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics（浙江省微结构特种光纤重点实验室，中国科学院上海光学精密机械研究所杭州分院）
Since the advent of atom laser-cooling, trapping or cooling natural molecules has been a long standing and challenging goal. Here, we demonstrate a method for laser-trapping molecules that is radically novel in its configuration, in its underlined physical dynamics and in its outcomes. It is based on self-optically spatially-nanostructured high pressure molecular hydrogen confined in hollow-core photonic-crystal-fibre. An accelerating molecular-lattice is formed by a periodic potential associated with Raman saturation except for a 1-dimentional array of nanometer wide and strongly-localizing s…
