Hollow-core holey fibers are promising candidates for low-loss guidance of light in various applications, e.g., for the use in laser guide star adaptive optics systems in optical astronomy. We present an accurate and fast method for the computation of light modes in arbitrarily shaped waveguides. Maxwell's equations are discretized using vectorial finite elements (FEM). We discuss how we utilize concepts like adaptive grid refinement, higher-order finite elements, and transparent boundary conditions for the computation of leaky modes in photonic crystal fibers. Further, we investigate the convergence behavior of our methods. We employ our FEM solver to design hollow-core photonic crystal fibers (HCPCF) whose cores are formed from 19 omitted cladding unit cells. We optimize the fiber geometry for minimal attenuation using multidimensional optimization taking into account radiation loss (leaky modes).
We demonstrate a fibre-based approach that generates mid-infrared femtosecond pulses in the 3-4 μm spectral region with microjoule-level single pulse energy. This is realised in a piece of gas-filled antiresonant hollow-core fibre that is pumped by a two-micron light source. A rapid variation of the dispersion near a structural resonance of the fibre creates a phase-matching point in the mid-infrared, which mediates the frequency-down conversion. We generate femtosecond pulses centred at 3.16 μm wavelength with the pulse energy of more than 1 μJ, achieving the conversion efficiency as high as …
High-energy ultraviolet pulse generation in gas-filled hollow capillary fibers (HCFs) through dispersive-wave-emission process, has attracted considerable attentions in recent several years due to its great application potentials in ultraviolet spectroscopy and photochemistry. While the ability of this technique to deliver high-energy, ultrafast ultraviolet pulses is widely recognized, few-fs duration of μJ-level dispersive-wave (DW) pulses has, however, escaped direct measurements. In this letter, we demonstrate that using several chirped mirrors, few-fs ultraviolet DW pulses can be obtained …
We numerically investigate the energy and arrival-time noise of ultrashort laser pulses produced via resonant dispersive wave emission in gas-filled hollow-core waveguides under the influence of pump-laser instability. We find that for low pump energy, fluctuations in the pump energy are strongly amplified. However, when the generation process is saturated, the energy of the resonant dispersive wave can be significantly less noisy than that of the pump pulse. This holds for a variety of generation conditions and while still producing few-femtosecond pulses. We further find that the arrival-tim…
Gas-filled hollow-core photonic crystal fiber (PCF) is used for efficient nonlinear temporal compression of femtosecond laser pulses, two main schemes being direct soliton-effect self-compression, and spectral broadening followed by phase compensation. To obtain stable compressed pulses, it is crucial to avoid decoherence through modulational instability (MI) during spectral broadening. Here we show that changes in dispersion due to spectral anti-crossings between the fundamental core mode and core wall resonances in anti-resonant-guiding hollow-core PCF can strongly alter the MI gain spectrum…
We investigate refractive index changes caused by femtosecond photoionization in a gas-filled hollow-core photonic crystal fiber. Using spatially-resolved interferometric side-probing, we find that these changes live for tens of microseconds after the photoionization event - eight orders of magnitude longer than the pulse duration. Oscillations in the megahertz frequency range are simultaneously observed, caused by mechanical vibrations of the thin-walled capillaries surrounding the hollow core. These two non-local effects can affect the propagation of a second pulse that arrives within their …
We demonstrate an efficient scheme for the generation of broadband, high-energy, circularly polarized femtosecond laser pulses in the deep ultraviolet through seeded degenerate four-wave mixing in stretched gas-filled hollow capillary fibers. Pumping and seeding with circularly polarized 35 fs pulses centered at 400 nm and 800 nm, respectively, we generate idler pulses centered at 266 nm with more than 25 microjoule of energy and over 95% spectrally averaged ellipticity. Even higher idler energies and broad spectra (27 nm bandwidth) can be obtained at the cost of reduced ellipticity. Our syste…
We report trapping and propagation of photonic Dirac mode in a helically twisted hollow core photonic crystal fiber (HC-PCF) where the trapped light in the hollow (air) defect can preserve the orbital angular momentum (OAM). We show that a photonic Dirac point can emerge even in a twisted system for a suitable choice of curvilinear coordinate and the related waveguide defect modes defined in the new basis can preserve the associated OAM during axial translation. The effect of twist rate, defect geometry and crystal dimension on the propagation of OAM carrying trapped Dirac modes is critically …
Optical soliton dynamics can cause the extreme alteration of the temporal and spectral shape of a propagating light pulse. They occur at up to kilowatt peak powers in glass-core optical fibres and the gigawatt level in gas-filled microstructured hollow-core fibres. Here we demonstrate optical soliton dynamics in large-core hollow capillary fibres. This enables scaling of soliton effects by several orders of magnitude to the multi-mJ energy and terawatt peak power level. We experimentally demonstrate two key soliton effects. First, we observe self-compression to sub-cycle pulses and infer the c…
A recently developed source of ultraviolet radiation, based on optical soliton propagation in a gas-filled hollow-core photonic crystal fiber, is applied here to angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy (ARPES). Near-infrared femtosecond pulses of only few μJ energy generate vacuum ultraviolet (VUV) radiation between 5.5 and 9 eV inside the gas-filled fiber. These pulses are used to measure the band structure of the topological insulator Bi2Se3 with a signal to noise ratio comparable to that obtained with high order harmonics from a gas jet. The two-order-of-magnitude gain in efficiency promi…
We demonstrate, for the first time, the application of rare-gas filled hollow-core photonic crystal fibres (HC-PCFs) as tuneable ultraviolet light sources in femtosecond pump-probe spectroscopy. The time-resolved photoelectron imaging technique reveals non-adiabatic dynamical processes operating on three distinct timescales in the styrene molecule following excitation over the 242-258 nm region. These include ultrafast (<100 fs) internal conversion between the S2(pipi*) and S1(pipi*) electronic states and subsequent intramolecular vibrational energy redistribution within S1(pipi*). Compact, co…
We vary the time-frequency mode structure of ultrafast pulse-pumped modulational instability (MI) twin beams in an argon-filled hollow-core kagomé-style PCF by adjusting the pressure, pump pulse chirp, fiber length and parametric gain. Compared to solid-core systems, the pressure dependent dispersion landscape brings increased flexibility to the tailoring of frequency correlations and we demonstrate that the pump pulse chirp can be used to tune the joint spectrum of femtosecond-pumped sources. We also characterize the resulting mode content, not only by measuring the multimode second-order cor…
Vacuum ultraviolet (VUV) light is critical for the study of molecules and materials, but the generation of femtosecond pulses in the VUV region at high repetition rates has proven difficult. Here, we demonstrate the efficient generation of VUV light at MHz repetition rates using highly cascaded four-wave mixing processes in a negative-curvature hollow-core fiber. Both even and odd order harmonics are generated up to the 15th harmonic (69 nm, 18.0 eV), with high energy resolution of ~40 meV. In contrast to direct high harmonic generation, this highly cascaded harmonic generation process require…
The theoretical study of laser-induced heating of a transport cargo microcontainer constituting a hollow dielectric microcapsule with water filling and a light absorbing polymer shell is presented. By means of FDTD and FEM techniques, the numerical calculations of optical field spatial distribution inside and near the microcapsules are carried out, and the temporal dynamics of temperature profiles of core-shell microparticles of various morphological types (spheres, ellipsoids, boxes, cubes, cylinders) and microcapsule clusters in different configurations is addressed. The spatial configuratio…
