World Record in Coherent Supercontinuum Generation

The group led by Prof. Jens Biegert reports in Nature Communications the generation of a world-record coherent high-energy 3.3 octave supercontinuum. The breakthrough, a coherent supercontinuum ranging from 450 nm to 4500 nm, was generated with the development of a source of intense few-cycle mid-IR pulses and nonlinear propagation in the anomalous dispersion regime. The results were published in Nature Communications as a collaborative work between the Attoscience and Ultrafast Optics group led by Prof. Biegert with theoretical support from Prof. Couairon from Ecole Polytechnique in France and Prof. Faccio from Heriot-Watt University in the UK. This bulk supercontinuum source, with the highest spectral energy density, has the potential to impact significant advances in spectroscopy such as CARS. Other potential applications could be applied to the search for extrasolar planets with astro combs, enabling frequency comb spectroscopy across all molecular finger print regions at once, or in aiding coherent seeding and multi-color field synthesis for the next generation of attosecond pulse generation.