Dramatic Enhancement of Supercontinuum Generation by Using Dissonant Two-Color Laser Fields

Supercontinuum generation (SCG) in femtosecond [1] and/or picosecond [2], [3] filamentation offers a unique and versatile source of coherent ultrabroadband radiation. Depending on the plasma density realized in the nonlinear media, the filamentation can be classified into two regimes: the Kerr-dominated regime and the plasma-dominated regime [4]. While the thermal load to the nonlinear media, which is a crucial factor for high repetition rate operations, can be suppressed significantly in the Kerr-dominated regime, the plasma-dominated regime is normally adopted to have SC's with sufficiently broad spectra. In this presentation, by using a dissonant two-color filamentation scheme with an Yb:KGW regen. [180 fs, <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\lambda_{1}=1036$</tex> nm, <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\leq 80\ \mathrm{W},\leq 2$</tex> MHz; Carbide (Light Conversion Ltd.)] and an optical parametric amplifier (OPA; 60 fs, <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\lambda_{2}=650-2000$</tex> nm), we demonstrate dramatic enhancement of SCG in the Kerr-dominated regime, which is in contrast with the so-called harmonics-enhanced SC in the plasma-dominated regime [4]–[7].