A novel way to generate visible light

Date:
October 29, 2021
Source:
Institut national de la recherche scientifique - INRS
Summary:
An international research team demonstrates how to generate
extremely short pulses of visible light using an industrial-grade
laser system.



FULL STORY ========================================================================== Visible light is extremely important in nature. Seen by the human eye,
it is the most intense light emitted by the sun to reach the earth's
surface and is an essential element for fundamental biological processes underlying life.

However, it is difficult to generate coherent visible light, like the
light of a laser, that is intense for a short amount of time, in the
order of the femtosecond (one millionth of one billionth of a second).


==========================================================================
A research team, directed by Professor Luca Razzari of the Institut
national de la recherche scientifique (INRS), has successfully achieved
this goal without using a complicated system. The results of their work
were recently published in the journal Nature Photonics.

An Accessible Setup To generate visible light of that timescale,
the team used an industrial-grade laser system available for most
laboratories. They discovered that by propagating an infrared laser
pulse in a hollow-core fibre filled with argon gas, a nonlinear effect generated short pulses of visible light with high intensity. "We
observe a mixing of the different 'modes,' i.e., the spatial shapes the
light beam takes as it propagates through the fibre, that creates this
effect. It occurs only with intense light," explains Professor Razzari. He collaborated with Professors Roberto Morandotti and Franc,ois Le'gare'
at INRS for the experimental part of the work, as well as with a team of international researchers, from the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS) (France), Louisiana State University (United States) and Heriot-Watt University (United Kingdom), for the theoretical modelling
of the observed phenomenon.

This innovative approach, for the first time, does not rely on complex
and expensive optical architectures to generate such ultrashort visible
light pulses. As a result, it could be made widely available to explore
a vast variety of phenomena in physics, chemistry, as well as biology,
such as photosynthesis or even human vision. "With our pulses, we can
study the dynamics of such processes and how they evolve on extremely
short timescales," says the postdoctoral researcher Riccardo Piccoli,
first author of the paper.

This collaborative research project greatly benefited from the expertise
of the INRS startup few-cycle,which markets the special system to stretch
and hold such hollow-core fibres.

========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by Institut_national_de_la_recherche_scientifique_-_INRS.

Original written by Audrey-Maude Ve'zina. Note: Content may be edited
for style and length.


========================================================================== Journal Reference:
1. R. Piccoli, J. M. Brown, Y.-G. Jeong, A. Rovere, L. Zanotto, M. B.

Gaarde, F. Le'gare', A. Couairon, J. C. Travers, R. Morandotti,
B. E.

Schmidt, L. Razzari. Intense few-cycle visible pulses directly
generated via nonlinear fibre mode mixing. Nature Photonics, 2021;
DOI: 10.1038/ s41566-021-00888-7 ==========================================================================

Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/10/211029074920.htm

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