Post-compression of long-wave infrared 2 picosecond sub-terawatt pulses in bulk materials

We have experimentally demonstrated the post-compression of a long-wave infrared (9.2 μm) 150 GW peak power pulse from 2 ps to less than 500 fs using a sequence of two bulk materials with negative group velocity dispersion (GVD). The compression resulted in up to 1.6-fold increase of the peak power and up to 2.8-fold increase of the intensity in the center of a quasi-Gaussian beam. The partial decoupling of the self-phase modulation and chirp compensation stages by using two materials with significantly different ratios of nonlinear refractive index to GVD provides accurate optimization of the compression mechanism and promises a viable path to scaling peak powers to supra-terawatt levels. During the preparatory study, we measured, for the first time to our knowledge, the nonlinear refractive indices of NaCl, KCl, and BaF₂ for picosecond pulses in the long-wave infrared region.