Osnabrück 2002 – scientific programme

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MO: Molekülphysik

MO 9: Femtosekundenspektroskopie III: Pulskontrolle (gemeinsam mit FV Q)

MO 9.1: Talk

Wednesday, March 6, 2002, 14:00–14:15, HS 15/E07

Generation and Amplification of Ultrashort Shaped Laser Pulses in the Visible by a Two-Stage Noncollinear Optical Parametric Process — •Elmar Schreiber, Howe Siang Tan, and Warren S. Warren — Center for Ultrafast Laser Applications, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ 08544 (USA)

The shaping of ultrashort laser pulses is of increasing interest in a wide variety of optical applications, including quantum and optimal control, high speed communications, and material characterization. Usually, pulse shaping is performed as a final step, although this mostly introduces significant energy losses. We have demonstrated for the first time, the amplification of non-trivially shaped pulses by a noncollinear optical parametric process with the conservation in its phase and amplitude profile [Optics Letters 26 (2001) 1812]. Shaped pulses with complex phase structure (e.g. a hyperbolic tangent frequency sweep) and strong amplitude modulation (e.g. a sine squared function) centered at 625 nm with a bandwidth of up to 70 nm are amplified from ∼0.1 J to ∼5 J. The used concept neatly eliminates the energy losses normally associated with the production of complex shaped pulses. A number of examples characterized by spectrally and temporally resolved up-conversion technique will be presented. A generalization to shaped pulses centered at other wavelengths in the visible and infrared is straightforward, and is restricted only by the tunability of a NOPA system [Optics Letters, in press].