Generation of Millijoule Few-Cycle Pulses by a Compact Single-Stage Gas-Filled Multi-Pass Cell

We report on nonlinear spectral broadening and post-compression of 1-mJ, 146-fs pulses in a compact single-stage gas-filled multi-pass cell (MPC). With an overall transmission of ~96%, the compressed pulses have a duration of 17.3 fs (corresponding to a compression factor of ~8.4) with 0.96-mJ energy and excellent beam quality (M<inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$^{2} = 1.35\times 1.12$ </tex-math></inline-formula>). To the best of our knowledge, this work marks the first successful generation of millijoule-level few-cycle pulses at a 1-<inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$\mu $ </tex-math></inline-formula>m wavelength using a single-stage gas-filled MPC.