Multicolor femtosecond laser with mu J level by cascaded four-wave mixing

Abstract

Tunable multicolor femtosecond pulses were simultaneously obtained by a cascaded four-wave mixing process in a fused-silica glass plate. Frequency up-shift and down-shift pulses with energies of about 1 mu J and durations of 45 fs sidebands were obtained. When one of the two input beams was negatively chirped and the other was positively chirped, self-compressed multicolor 20 fs pulses, which were nearly transform limited, were obtained.