Characterizing few-cycle UV resonant dispersive waves through direct field sampling

Abstract

We demonstrate compression of few-cycle ultraviolet (UV) resonant dispersive waves (RDWs) generated in a cascaded hollow capillary fiber setup using a Yb laser system. Temporal characterization is performed using both tunneling ionization with a perturbation for the time-domain observation of an electric field (TIPTOE) and self-diffraction frequency-resolved optical gating (SD-FROG), which show good agreement. Through careful dispersion management, we compress the RDW pulse to 6.9 fs at a ∼390-nm central wavelength. This is the first, to our knowledge, measurement of an RDW using the TIPTOE method and demonstrates the viability of this technique to reliably characterize few-cycle UV pulses with μJ pulse energies. © 2025 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.