Syllabus
1. Introduction, motivation and important applications of ultrashort laser pulses.
2. Ultrashort pulse propagation in linear media, dispersion compensation.
3. Ultrashort pulse propagation in nonlinear media, nonlinear pulse compression, wavelength conversion.
4. Generation of ultrashort pulses by mode-locking, theory of active and passive mode-locking, Haus master equation.
5. Femtosecond lasers – types, typical setups. Femtosecond amplifiers, optical parametric amplifiers and oscillators.
6. Characterization of femtosecond laser pulses. Pulse shaping.
7. Femtosecond frequency comb, carrier-envelope phase stabilization. Noise sources and its reduction in experiments.
8. High harmonic generation, attosecond pulses, characterization.
9. Generation and measurement of THz pulses.
10. Generation of coherent X-ray pulses using free-electron lasers (X-FEL).
Annotation
Ultrashort laser pulses have applications in many fields of physics or chemistry for measurement of ultrafast phenomena occurring on short timescales (typically ps-ns). This lecture is focused on the introduction to the physics of ultrashort laser pulses with time durations in the femtosecond domain.
We will discuss practical and theoretical concepts related to linear and nonlinear optical phenomena related to ultrashort pulse propagation in matter, their generation, practical applications and characterization of their properties.