Generation of microJ-level multicolored femtosecond laser pulses using cascaded four-wave mixing.

Multicolor femtosecond pulses were simultaneously obtained by a cascaded FWM process in fused silica glass. The sideband spectra were tunable by changing the crossing angle of the two input beams. Frequency up-shift and down-shift pulses with energies as high as 1 microJ, durations of 45 fs, nearly diffraction limited Gaussian spatial profiles, and power stability smaller than 2% RMS of the generated sidebands were obtained. These multicolor sidebands can be used in various experiments, such as multicolor pump-probe experiment.