Ultrashort pulse compression and delivery in a hollow-core photonic crystal fiber at 540 nm wavelength

We have fabricated a bandgap-guiding hollow-core photonic crystal fiber (PCF) capable of transmitting and compressing ultrashort pulses in the green spectral region around 532nm. When propagating subpicosecond pulses through 1m of this fiber, we have observed soliton-effect temporal compression by up to a factor of 3 to around 100fs. This reduces the wavelength at which soliton effects have been observed in hollow-core PCF by over 200nm. We have used the pulses delivered at the output of the fiber to machine micrometer-scale features in copper.