Low-threshold efficient N${_2^+}$ lasing driven by sub-cycle soliton dynamics in a hollow waveguide
The phenomenon of N${_2^+}$ lasing, observed in femtosecond-laser filamentation, attract considerable interests in recent several years, with great application potentials in fields of remote sensing and ultrafast spectroscopy. Efficient N${_2^+}$ lasing at relatively-low pump energies and with high beam quality, while being highly-demanded for applications, remains, however, quite challenging in practical experiments. Here, we demonstrate a new route of generating low-threshold N${_2^+}$ lasing with unprecedently-high efficiency, which is enabled by soliton dynamics in a gas-filled hollow-tapered-capillary system. High-order-soliton compression of a 12-fs, 10-${\mu}$J-level pump pulse forms a sub-cycle asymmetric transient that tunnel-ionizes N${_2}$ to N${_2^+}$ and, through direct, single-photon resonant excitation, creates population inversion between the ground state ${X^2\Sigma_g^+}$ and the excited state ${B^2\Sigma_u^+}$${-}$a dynamic process distinct from the widely adopted three-state coupling picture${-}$and remarkably at unexpectedly low pump energy. In the experiments, we obtained 100-nJ-level N${_2^+}$ lasing pulses at 391 nm with conversion efficiencies up to 3.3$\times$10$^{-3}$, at pump energies of less than 50 ${\mu}$J. These results represent improvement of more than one orders of magnitude in both generation efficiency and lasing threshold, compared with prevailing filamentation-based schemes. Our study bridges two generally-disparate fields (sub-cycle soliton dynamics and N${_2^+}$ lasing), and paves the way for narrow-band, high-beam-quality lasing pulses that may find wide applications in advanced spectroscopy and nonlinear pump-probe experiments.