Third- and fifth-harmonic generation in transparent solids with few-optical-cycle midinfrared pulses

We report an experimental and numerical investigation of third- and fifth-harmonic generation in a CaF2 crystal with 20 fs (three-optical-cycle), 2 μm driving pulses. The double-peaked temporal profile of the third-harmonic pulse and its propagation dynamics was captured by means of the cross-correlation technique, showing that the third-harmonic pulse naturally consists of free and driven components propagating with different group velocities, and which occur without the splitting of the driving pulse at the fundamental frequency. Relevant characteristics of the harmonics generation process, such as the harmonics spectra, energy oscillations, and conversion efficiency, were measured as functions of propagation length and input-pulse energy and intensity. Our results demonstrate that the fifth harmonic is generated solely via cascaded four-wave mixing between the fundamental and third-harmonic frequency pulses due to cubic nonlinearity, without any detectable contribution of six-wave mixing due to quintic nonlinearity in the process.