Generating mid-IR octave-spanning supercontinua and few-cycle pulses with solitons in phase-mismatched quadratic nonlinear crystals

We discuss a novel method for generating octave-spanning supercontinua and few-cycle pulses in the important mid-IR wavelength range. The technique relies on strongly phase-mismatched cascaded second-harmonic generation (SHG) in mid-IR nonlinear frequency conversion crystals. Importantly we here investigate the so-called noncritical SHG case, where no phase matching can be achieved but as a compensation the largest quadratic nonlinearities are exploited. A self-defocusing temporal soliton can be excited if the cascading nonlinearity is larger than the competing material self-focusing nonlinearity, and we define a suitable figure of merit to screen a wide range of mid-IR dielectric and semiconductor materials with large effective second-order nonlinearities deff. The best candidates have simultaneously a large bandgap and a large deff. We show selected realistic numerical examples using one of the promising crystals: in one case soliton pulse compression from 50 fs to 15 fs (1.5 cycles) at 3.0 μm is achieved, and at the same time a 3-cycle dispersive wave at 5.0 μm is formed that can be isolated using a long-pass filter. In another example we show that extremely broadband supercontinua can form spanning the near-IR to the end of the mid-IR (nearly 4 octaves). © 2013 Optical Society of America OCIS codes: (320.5520) Pulse compression; (320.7110) Ultrafast nonlinear optics; (190.5530) Pulse propagation and temporal solitons; (190.2620) Harmonic generation and mixing; (320.2250) Femtosecond phenomena. References and links 1. H. J. Bakker, Y. L. A. Rezus, and R. L. A. Timmer, “Molecular reorientation of liquid water studied with femtosecond midinfrared spectroscopy,” J. Phys. Chem. A 112, 11523–11534 (2008). 2. M. Rini, R. Tobey, N. Dean, J. Itatani, Y. Tomioka, Y. Tokura, R. W. Schoenlein, and A. 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