Takayoshi KOBAYASHI^1,2,3,4* and Jun LIU^1,2

¹Department of Applied Physics and Chemistry and Institute for Laser Science, University of Electro-Communications, 1-5-1 Chofugaoka, Chofu, Tokyo 182-8585, Japan
²International Cooperative Research Project (ICORP), Japan Science and Technology Agency, 4-1-8 Honcho, Kawaguchi, Saitama 332-0012, Japan
³Department of Electrophysics, National Chiao Tung University, 1001 Ta Hsueh Rd., Hsinchu 300, Taiwan
⁴Institute of Laser Engineering, Osaka University, 2-6 Yamada-oka, Suita, Osaka 565-0871, Japan

(Received August 26, 2009; Accepted December 27, 2009)

Tunable multicolor femtosecond pulses were simultaneously obtained by a cascaded four-wave mixing process in a fused-silica glass plate. Frequency up-shift and down-shift pulses with energies of about 1 μJ and durations of 45 fs sidebands were obtained. When one of the two input beams was negatively chirped and the other was positively chirped, self-compressed multicolor 20 fs pulses, which were nearly transform limited, were obtained.

Key words: four-wave mixing, multicolor, femtosecond, negative chirp

^*E-mail address: kobayashi@ils.uec.ac.jp