Nonlinear spectral cleaning of few-cycle pulses via cross-polarized wave (XPW) generation

Abstract : The characterization of a temporal filter based on cross-polarized wave generation working in the few-optical-cycle regime is presented. We show that this device dramatically improves the spectral quality of the ultrashort seed pulses, opening the way to the production of sub-10 fs pulses with high incoherent and coherent contrast. The dispersion compensation conditions for an optimized behavior of the process are experimentally and theoretically discussed.