John’s article on hollow-core fiber compression of Yb laser pulses, and their application to gas-phase high-order harmonic generation has been published in the Journal of the Optical Society of America B. This result marks an important step in our march towards generating isolated attosecond pulses! Congratulations, John!

Our time-resolved ARPES setup is now operational! The image below shows a Dirac cone in the electronic band structure of a topological metal, measured using high-order harmonic probe pulses. This project is led by Dr. Yangyang Liu, in a collaboration with UCF’s Laboratory for Advanced Spectroscopic Characterization of Quantum Materials, led by Prof. Madhab Neupane.

Mike was featured in the September issue of Florida Trend magazine! Thanks to Jason Garcia and Norma Lopez Molina for the nice article and cool photo!

Mike is a co-author on the paper “Direct compression of 170-fs 50-cycle pulses down to 1.5 cycles with 70% transmission,” as a part of an international team led by Bruno Schmidt (few-cycle, Inc.) and Luca Razzari (INRS). The article was published in Scientific Reports (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-30198-y). This result is an important step on our path towards generating single-cycle laser pulses from our Yb laser amplifier, and isolated attosecond pulses through high-order harmonic generation!

Federico Rivas, an undergraduate student from Valencia College working in the LUMAS group through the UCF-Valencia PREP (Physics Research Exchange Program), presented his research project “PCGPA & its Applications to Frequency-Resolved Optical Gating” at the program’s final symposium today. Federico developed a LabVIEW-based PCPGA code and used it to reconstruct few-cycle pulses from FROG traces generated in the lab. We were happy to have Federico in the lab this summer, and wish him luck as he continues his studies in the Department of Physics at the University of Florida this fall!

We are excited to begin work on two NSF-funded projects, “Mechanisms and Phase Matching of Below-Threshold High-Order Harmonic Generation in Solids” (NSF AMO-Experiment Program) and “Probing Strong Electronic Correlations in Ferroelectrics and Multiferroics Through High-Order Harmonic Spectroscopy and First-Principles Calculations” (NSF Condensed Matter Physics Program)!

We are grateful to have been selected for the DOE Office of Science’s Early Career Research Award!

https://today.ucf.edu/ucf-physicist-selected-750000-early-career-energy-grant/

Shima’s article on self-compression of mid-IR pulses, and their application to solid-state high-order harmonic generation was published in the Journal of the Optical Society of America B (https://doi.org/10.1364/JOSAB.35.000A27). This result marks an important step towards the generation of attosecond optical pulses using solid-state high-order harmonic generation. The collaboration with Alexis Chacón, of Los Alamos National Laboratory, was enabled by funding from Oak Ridge Associated Universities.

Yangyang Liu has joined our research group as a postdoc. Dr. Liu received his PhD degree in 2017 from the Institute of Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences and will work with the LUMAS group and the Neupane group on time- and angle-resolved photoemission spectroscopy. Welcome, Yangyang!

John’s article on pulse compression of our Yb:KGW laser was published in Applied Physics Letters (https://doi.org/10.1063/1.5018758). By compressing the pulses from ~300 fs to <20 fs, we have achieved an important step towards attosecond measurements with high-power Yb-based lasers systems.