Adiabatic processes in frequency conversion

Abstract

Adiabatic evolution, an important dynamical process in a variety of classical and quantum systems providing a robust way of steering a system into a desired state [1-5], was introduced only recently to frequency conversion [6-9]. Adiabatic frequency conversion allowed the achievement of efficient scalable broadband frequency conversion [8, 9] and was applied successfully to the conversion of ultrashort pulses, demonstrating near-100% efficiency for ultrabroadband spectrum [10-16]. The underlying analogy between undepleted pump nonlinear processes and coherently excited quantum systems was extended in the past few years to multi-level quantum systems, demonstrating new concepts in frequency conversion, such as complete frequency conversion through an absorption band [17-20]. Additionally, the undepleted pump restriction was removed, enabling the exploration of adiabatic processes in the fully nonlinear dynamics regime of nonlinear optics [21-26]. In this article, the basic concept of adiabatic frequency conversion is introduced, and recent advances in ultrashort physics, multi-process systems, and the fully nonlinear dynamics regime are reviewed.