Soliton Self-Compression and UV Dispersive Wave Emission in Compact Hollow Capillary Systems

Soliton dynamics underlie a wide range of phenomena in nonlinear fibre optics. In particular, higher-order solitons in gas-filled hollow-core photonic crystal fibre (HC-PCF) have been applied to self-compression of ultrafast laser pulses [1] and the generation of widely tuneable resonant dispersive waves (RDW) from the vacuum ultraviolet (VUV) to the visible spectral range [2]. We recently demonstrated that by moving to long, large-core hollow capillary fibres (HCF) and shorter driving pulses, these effects can be scaled by up to three orders of magnitude in pulse energy, providing unprecedented peak power in ultrafast VUV pulses as well as a route towards terawatt-scale optical attosecond pulses [3]. Here we show that by further decreasing the initial pulse duration, high-energy soliton dynamics can be obtained in HCF as short as 35 cm.