A novel way to generate visible light

Visible light is extremely important in nature. Seen by the human eye, it is the most intense light emitted by the sun to reach the earth's surface and is an essential element for fundamental biological processes underlying life. However, it is difficult to generate coherent visible light, like the light of a laser, that is intense for a short amount of time, in the order of the femtosecond.

To generate visible light of that timescale, a research team used an industrial-grade laser system available for most laboratories. They discovered that by propagating an infrared laser pulse in a hollow-core fiber filled with argon gas, a nonlinear effect generated short pulses of visible light with high intensity.

This innovative approach, for the first time, does not rely on complex and expensive optical architectures to generate such ultrashort visible light

pulses. As a result, it could be made widely available to explore a vast variety of phenomena in physics, chemistry, as well as biology, such as photosynthesis or even human vision.