Ultrashort Laser Pulse Generation

Ultrashort laser pulse generation is a pre-requisite for many physics applications ranging from high field physics to extreme nonlinear optics. Meanwhile the creation of few cycle pulses is still not trivial and should be handled with a lot of care. In this chapter, we will highlight two methods to generate few cycle pulses. The first one consists, in the near-IR, in the use of filamentation to broaden the spectrum of the initial pulse to allow recompression to shorter duration, but also technique of direct recompression from the filamentation. The second one involves a complete new approach to generate few-cycle pulses in the mid-IR using optical parametric chirped pulse amplification. We furthermore show recent attempts to adequately characterize such few-cycle pulses and limitations of the used methods.