Generation of sub-20-fs multicolor laser pulses using cascaded four-wave mixing with chirped incident pulses

Negatively chirped or nearly transform-limited output pulses can be obtained in a four-wave mixing process when one of the pump beams is negatively chirped and the other is positively chirped. Nearly transform-limited 16 fs multicolor laser pulses are obtained in a fused-silica glass plate using this method. The resulting frequency shifts and compressed multicolor sidebands are continuously tunable in wavelength by varying the crossing angle between the two input beams. Sub-10-fs multicolor pulses should be possible obtained using this method in the future.