Ultrafast supercontinuum generation in gas-filled waveguides is an enabling technology for many intriguing applications ranging from attosecond metrology towards biophotonics, with the amount of spectral broadening crucially depending on the pulse dispersion of the propagating mode. In this study, we show that structural resonances in a gas-filled antiresonant hollow core optical fiber provide an additional degree of freedom in dispersion engineering, which enables the generation of more than three octaves of broadband light that ranges from deep UV wavelengths to near infrared. Our observation relies on the introduction of a geometric-induced resonance in the spectral vicinity of the ultrafast pump laser, outperforming gas dispersion and yielding a unique dispersion profile independent of core size, which is highly relevant for scaling input powers. Using a krypton-filled fiber, we observe spectral broadening from 200 nm to 1.7 μm at an output energy of ∼ 23 μJ within a single optical mode across the entire spectral bandwidth. Simulations show that the frequency generation results from an accelerated fission process of soliton-like waveforms in a non-adiabatic dispersion regime associated with the emission of multiple phase-matched Cherenkov radiations on both sides of the resonance. This effect, along with the dispersion tuning and scaling capabilities of the fiber geometry, enables coherent ultra-broadband and high-energy sources, which range from the UV to the mid-infrared spectral range.

The generation of high order harmonics from femtosecond mid-IR laser pulses in ZnO has shown great potential to reveal new insight into the ultrafast electron dynamics on a few femtosecond timescale. In this work we report on the experimental investigation of photoluminescence and high-order harmonic generation (HHG) in a ZnO single crystal and polycrystalline thin film irradiated with intense femtosecond mid-IR laser pulses. The ellipticity dependence of the HHG process is experimentally studied up to the 17th harmonic order for various driving laser wavelengths in the spectral range 3-4 µm. Interband Zener tunneling is found to exhibit a significant excitation efficiency drop for circularly polarized strong-field pump pulses. For higher harmonics with energies larger than the bandgap, the measured ellipticity dependence can be quantitatively described by numerical simulations based on the density matrix equations. The ellipticity dependence of the below and above ZnO band gap harmonics as a function of the laser wavelength provides an efficient method for distinguishing the dominant HHG mechanism for different harmonic orders.

High-harmonic generation (HHG) in solids has been touted as a way to probe ultrafast dynamics and crystal symmetries in condensed matter systems. Here, we investigate the polarization properties of high-order harmonics generated in monolayer MoS_{2}, as a function of crystal orientation relative to the mid-infrared laser field polarization. At several different laser wavelengths we experimentally observe a prominent angular shift of the parallel-polarized odd harmonics for energies above approximately 3.5 eV, and our calculations indicate that this shift originates in subtle differences in the recombination dipole strengths involving multiple conduction bands. This observation is material specific and is in addition to the angular dependence imposed by the dynamical symmetry properties of the crystal interacting with the laser field, and may pave the way for probing the vectorial character of multiband recombination dipoles.