Generation of Intense Supercontinuum in Condensed Media

Generation of supercontinuum in condensed media is a well-known approach to expand the spectrum of a femtosecond laser pulse. Yet large material dispersion and low optical damage threshold have limited input pulse energy to a few microjoules, making solids unattractive for high power applications [1]. Here we report the use of a multiple plates system that overcomes these problems to generate an intense supercontinuum (MPContinuum) that contains several hundred microjoules of energy and preserves the advantages of being compact, simple to operate, and highly reproducible [2]. With this multiple plates approach, we have obtained pulses that have an octave-spanning spectrum that covers from 450 nm to ~980 nm at the −20 dB intensity level while converting as much as 62 % of the input pulse energy to the MPContinuum. Frequency-resolved optical gating and spectral interferometric measurements indicate that the pulse is phase coherent so that it is compressible to a few femtoseconds.