Optical soliton dynamics can cause extreme alteration of the temporal and spectral shape of a propagating light pulse. This occurs at up to kilowatt peak powers in glass-core optical fibres and at the gigawatt level in gas-filled microstructured hollow-core fibres. Here, we demonstrate optical soliton dynamics in large-core hollow capillary fibres. This enables scaling of soliton effects by several orders of magnitude to the multi-millijoule energy and terawatt peak power level. We experimentally demonstrate two key soliton effects. First, we observe self-compression to sub-cycle pulses and infer the creation of sub-femtosecond field waveforms—a route to high-power optical attosecond pulse generation. Second, we efficiently generate continuously tunable high-energy (1–16 μJ) pulses in the vacuum and deep ultraviolet (110 nm to 400 nm) through resonant dispersive-wave emission. These results promise to be the foundation of a new generation of table-top light sources for ultrafast strong-field physics and advanced spectroscopy.

孤子动力学可能会导致传播的光脉冲的时间和光谱形状发生极端变化。这种情况在玻璃芯光纤中达到千瓦峰值功率时发生，而在充气微结构空心芯纤维中达到千兆瓦时出现。在这里，我们展示了大芯空心毛细管纤维中的孤子动力学。这可以将孤子效应按比例缩放几个数量级，以达到数毫焦耳的能量和兆瓦的峰值功率水平。我们通过实验证明了两个关键的孤子效应。首先，我们观察到对子周期脉冲的自压缩，并推断出亚飞秒场波形的产生，这是通向大功率光学阿秒脉冲产生的途径。第二，我们通过共振色散波发射，在真空和深紫外线（110 nm至400 nm）中有效地产生连续可调的高能量（1-16μJ）脉冲。这些结果有望成为用于超快强场物理和高级光谱学的新一代台式光源的基础。