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 $d_{\rm eff}$. The best candidates have simultaneously a large bandgap and a large $d_{\rm eff}$. 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\mic is achieved, and at the same time a 3-cycle dispersive wave at 5.0\mic 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).Comment: submitted to Optics Materials Express special issue on mid-IR photonic

Non-linear Plasma Wake Growth of Electron Holes

An object's wake in a plasma with small Debye length that drifts \emph{across} the magnetic field is subject to electrostatic electron instabilities. Such situations include, for example, the moon in the solar wind wake and probes in magnetized laboratory plasmas. The instability drive mechanism can equivalently be considered drift down the potential-energy gradient or drift up the density-gradient. The gradients arise because the plasma wake has a region of depressed density and electrostatic potential into which ions are attracted along the field. The non-linear consequences of the instability are analysed in this paper. At physical ratios of electron to ion mass, neither linear nor quasilinear treatment can explain the observation of large-amplitude perturbations that disrupt the ion streams well before they become ion-ion unstable. We show here, however, that electron holes, once formed, continue to grow, driven by the drift mechanism, and if they remain in the wake may reach a maximum non-linearly stable size, beyond which their uncontrolled growth disrupts the ions. The hole growth calculations provide a quantitative prediction of hole profile and size evolution. Hole growth appears to explain the observations of recent particle-in-cell simulations

Critical domain-wall dynamics of model B

With Monte Carlo methods, we simulate the critical domain-wall dynamics of model B, taking the two-dimensional Ising model as an example. In the macroscopic short-time regime, a dynamic scaling form is revealed. Due to the existence of the quasi-random walkers, the magnetization shows intrinsic dependence on the lattice size $L$. A new exponent which governs the $L$-dependence of the magnetization is measured to be $\sigma=0.243(8)$.Comment: 10pages, 4 figure