Abstract
We introduce a new post-compression, cascaded focus and compression, to achieve 50-fold compression of millijoule-level pulses at 1030 nm from 157 fs to 3.1 fs, with an output pulse energy of 0.98 mJ and an overall efficiency of 73%. When driving high-harmonic generation, these single-cycle pulses enable the creation of a carrier-envelope-phase-dependent extreme ultraviolet continuum with energies extending up to 180 eV, providing isolated ≈ 290-attosecond pulses at the output.