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Abstract

Many reports on stimulated Raman scattering in mixtures of Raman-active and noble gases indicate that the addition of a dispersive buffer gas increases the phase mismatch to higher-order Stokes and anti-Stokes sidebands, resulting in a preferential conversion to the first few Stokes lines, accompanied by a significant reduction in the Raman gain due to collisions with gas molecules. Here we report that, provided the dispersion can be precisely controlled, the effective Raman gain in a gas-filled hollow-core photonic crystal fiber can actually be significantly enhanced when a buffer gas is added. This counterintuitive behavior occurs when the nonlinear coupling between the interacting fields is strong and can result in a performance similar to that of a pure Raman-active gas, but at a much lower total gas pressure, allowing competing effects such as Raman backscattering to be suppressed. We report high modal purity in all the emitted sidebands, along with anti-Stokes conversion efficiencies as high as 5% in the visible and 2% in the ultraviolet. This new class of gas-based waveguide device, which allows the nonlinear optical response to be beneficially pressure-tuned by the addition of buffer gases, may find important applications in laser science and spectroscopy.