The HiLASE Centre team (Martin Duda, Lukáš Roškot, Martin Smrž and Ondřej Novák) together with the researchers from Max Born Institute for Nonlinear Optics and Short Pulse Spectroscopy have recently published a paper on 10-µJ few-cycle 12-µm source based on difference-frequency generation driven by a 1-kHz mid-wave infrared OPCPA in the Optics Letters journal. Here you can read the full article.
In the paper, the authors report on high-energy, few-cycle pulse generation in the long-wave infrared spectral region via difference-frequency generation (DFG) in GaSe and AgGaSe2 nonlinear crystals. The DFG is driven by the signal at 3.5 µm and idler at 5 µm of a high-power mid-wave infrared optical parametric chirped pulse amplification (OPCPA) system operating at a 1-kHz repetition rate. The DFG pulses contain up to 17 µJ of energy and cover a spectrum from 8.5 µm to 14.5 µm. They are generated with a conversion efficiency of 2.1 %. Compression results in 10.2-$\mathrm{\mu}$J pulses with sub-150-fs duration, corresponding to less than four optical cycles.
