Filamentation-free self-compression of mid-infrared pulses in birefringent crystals with second-order cascading-enhanced self-focusing nonlinearity.

We experimentally demonstrate virtually lossless, filamentation-free and energy-scalable more than three-fold self-compression of mid-infrared laser pulses at 2.1 μm in a birefringent medium (β-BBO crystal), which stems from favorable interplay between the second-order cascading-enhanced self-phase modulation and anomalous group velocity dispersion. By choosing an appropriate input beam diameter and intensity, the self-compression down to sub-30 fs pulse widths with gigawatt peak power is achieved without the onset of beam filamentation and associated nonlinear losses due to the multiphoton absorption, yielding the energy throughput greater than 86%.