Single-cycle pulse compression with over 20-fold peak power enhancement at an average power of 13.5 W

Intense single-cycle laser pulses serve as indispensable tools in disciplines such as strong-field physics and UV-IR spectroscopy. Traditional approaches for generating single-cycle pulses have encountered challenges in balancing high peak power, high average power, and high throughput efficiency. Here, we report the generation of 13.5-W, 3.7-fs single-cycle pulses with a peak power of 45.8 GW at a repetition rate of 50 kHz. By employing an argon-filled multi-pass cell and a single-pass compressor, we generated broadband white light spanning nearly two octaves. This approach achieved over 20-fold peak power enhancement and throughput efficiency of 67.5%. Our setup establishes an efficient methodology for producing single-cycle pulses from a common ytterbium laser, which simultaneously achieves high peak and high average power, facilitating many applications in ultrafast science.