Multi-TW Laser Pulses in the Single-Cycle Regime by Single Thin Plate Compression

Shortening the pulse duration of high peak power laser pulses to the single-cycle regime is very challenging due to damage threshold limitations of optical elements and spatio-temporal distortions of spatial intensity modulations of the input beam. Pulses as short as 10 fs have been already obtained with 100 TW-class input pulses by using the multiple thin plate technique [1]. On the other hand, single-cycle pulses with multi mJ energy have only been achieved via the use of the stretched hollow-core fiber method [2].