Study of soliton self-compression in photonic nanowires

Waveguides with sub-wavelength dimensions known as photonic nanowires are among the most attractive optical structures for ultrafast nonlinear optics. They provide high nonlinearities and allow the generation of cyclical temporal compression and broadband supercontinuum in few millimeters length. In this work, we numerically investigate the soliton self-compression in photonic nanowires fabricated by tapering standard single mode fibers. We demonstrate, the generation of 1.53 fs compressed pulse (ca. 0.57 single optical cycle) from 100 fs input pulse by pumping at low input pulse energy of 2.5 nJ, a 1.15 mm-long nanowire with a diameter of 800 nm. Thus, broadband supercontinuum spanning from 260 nm to 1800 nm is generated. Air-silica nanowires present very promising coherent white-light sources and ideal waveguides for nonlinear applications such as single-cycle pulses generation and optical processing.