When a powerful ultrashort laser pulse is focused into a transparent medium, it can undergo severe spectral broadening and be transformed into a white-light spectral continuum. Despite the continuum's widespread use as a tunable ultrafast light source, the mechanisms of continuum generation are still poorly understood. We report an experimental investigation of white-light continuum generation in transparent media using 100-fs pulses from a Ti:sapphire laser system. We measured the continuum's spectral width for a variety of materials and pump wavelengths. The materials were selected to cover...
Read more about The role of multiphoton excitation in ultrafast white-light continuum generation