Compression of Few-Microjoule Femtosecond Pulses in a Hollow-Core Revolver Fiber

Gas-filled hollow-core fibers are a convenient tool for laser pulse compression down to a few-cycle duration. The development of compact, efficient and high quality compression schemes for laser pulses of relatively low mu J-level energies is of particular interest. In this work, temporal pulse compression based on nonlinear spectral broadening in a xenon-filled revolver fiber followed by a chirped mirror system is investigated. A 250 fs pulse at a central wavelength of 1.03 mu m is compressed to 13.3 fs when the xenon pressure was tuned to provide zero group velocity dispersion near 1.03 mu m. The energies of input and compressed pulses are 3.8 and 2.7 mu J, respectively. The compression quality factor of 1.8 is achieved.