Chapter 13 - Ultrafast and Intense-Field Nonlinear Optics

Abstract

There is currently great interest in the physics of ultrashort laser pulses. Recent advances have led to the generation of laser pulses with durations of the order of 1 attosecond (Hentschel et al., 2001). Ultrashort pulses can be used to probe the properties of matter on extremely short time scales. Within the context of nonlinear optics, ultrashort laser pulses are of interest for at least two separate reasons. The first reason is that the nature of nonlinear optical interactions is often profoundly modified through the use of ultrashort laser pulses, in part because of the broad spectral bandwidth necessarily associated with such pulses. The next two sections of this chapter treat various aspects of the resulting modifications of the nature of nonlinear optical interactions. The second reason is that ultrashort laser pulses tend to possess extremely high peak intensities (because laser pulse energies tend to be established by the energy-storage capabilities of laser gain media), and thus short laser pulses tend to have much higher peak powers than longer pulses. The second half of this chapter is devoted to a survey of the sorts of nonlinear optical processes that can be excited by extremely intense laser fields.