Development of a Compact Optical Function Generator

Abstract: We have demonstrated that ultrafast optical waveforms can be obtained by Fourier synthesis of octave spanning frequency combs. There are two effective approaches of producing the combs. The first is by adiabatically driving the molecular vibrational coherence of H2 to its maximum. Using line-by-line shaping of five of the frequencies of this comb, we synthesized periodic waveforms in the shape of sawtooth, square, single-cycle sine and cosine and verified these shapes by a technique called shaper-assisted cross-correlation that we developed in our laboratory [1].