Generation of mu J multicolor femtosecond laser pulses using cascaded four-wave mixing

Abstract

Multicolor femtosecond pulses were simultaneously obtained by a cascaded FWM process in fused silica glass. The sideband spectra were tunable by changing the crossing angle of the two input beams. Frequency up-shift and down-shift pulses with energies as high as 1 mu J, durations of 45 fs, nearly diffraction limited Gaussian spatial profiles, and power stability smaller than 2% RMS of the generated sidebands were obtained. These multicolor sidebands can be used in various experiments, such as multicolor pump-probe experiment. (C) 2009 Optical Society of America