We present an experimental technique capable of single-shot recording of an ultrashort laser pulse sonogram by use of two-photon absorption in a conventional silicon CCD camera. The quadratic spectral phase, introduced into a 100-fs pulse by a grating stretcher, was measured and found to be in good agreement with the analytically calculated value. The nonlinear response of silicon allows sonogr...

We investigate the excitation of an atom or molecule via two-photon absorption induced by an ultrashort laser pulse in the perturbative intensity regime. We show that the probability for a resonant transition, i.e., with an intermediate state within the spectral width of the pulse, can be reduced to zero by pulses having a -phase step at a certain detuning from the central frequency. Our theore...

We report the first demonstration, to our knowledge, of passive mode locking in a Tm(3+), Ho(3+)-codoped KY(WO(4))(2) laser operating in the 2000-2060 nm spectral region. An InGaAsSb-based quantum well semiconductor saturable absorber mirror is used for the initiation and stabilization of the ultrashort pulse generation. Pulses as short as 3.3 ps were generated at 2057 nm with average output po...

Phase-stable parametric chirped-pulse amplification of ultrashort pulses from a carrier-envelope phase-stabilized mode-locked Ti:sapphire oscillator (11.0 fs) to 0.25 mJ/pulse at 1 kHz is demonstrated. Compression with a grating compressor and a LCD shaper yields near-Fourier-limited 11.8-fs pulses with an energy of 0.12 mJ. The amplifier is pumped by 532-nm pulses from a synchronized mode-lock...

The status is presented of the laser wakefield acceleration research at the 1'OASIS laboratory of the Center for Beam Physics at LBNL. Experiments have been performed on laser driven production of relativistic electron beams from plasmas using a high repetition rate (10 Hz), high power (10 TW) Tksapphire (0.8 jim) laser system. Large amplitude plasma waves have been excited in the self-modulate...

Status – Generation of stable pulse trains is important for numerous laser applications where ultrashort optical pulses are needed. Yet, increasing demand for pulses with more extreme characteristics has shifted the focus towards highly nonlinear, non-stationary regimes of laser operation. Of particular interest is the study of the chaotic pulses generated by passively mode-locked lasers. Being...

We present a remarkably simple technique for measuring the full spatio-temporal electric field of a single ultrashort laser pulse. It involves capturing a large digital hologram containing multiple smaller holograms, each of which characterizes the spatial intensity and phase distributions of an individual frequency component of the pulse. From that single camera frame, we numerically reconstru...

Picosecond optical pulse sources1 have been playing an increasingly impor tant role in the study of ultrafast processes and have potential application to highspeed electronics2 and optical communications. Interest in picosecond techniques has recently been stimulated by the generation of ultrashort pulses at high repetition rate, 3 but conventional sources have remained large and cumbersome lab...

The interaction of sub-picosecond laser pulses with magnetically ordered materials has developed into an extremely exciting research topic in modern magnetism. From the discovery of sub-picosecond demagnetization over a decade ago to the recent demonstration of magnetization reversal by a single 40 fs laser pulse, the manipulation of spins by ultrashort laser pulses has become a fundamentally c...