Divided-pulse nonlinear compression.

We report on the nonlinear pulse compression of temporally divided pulses, which is presented in a proof-of-principle experiment. A single 320 fs pulse is divided into four replicas, spectrally broadened in a solid-core fiber, and subsequently recombined. This approach makes it possible to reduce the nonlinearities in the fiber and therefore to use total input peak power of about 13.3 MW, which is more than three times higher than the self-focusing threshold. Finally, the combined output pulse could be compressed to sub-100 fs pulse duration. This general and universal approach holds promise for overcoming fundamental limitations of the pulse peak power that lead to destruction of the fiber or ionization limitations in high-energy hollow-core compression.