ECONOS in the epoch of CARS renaissance

Abstract

Back in the early 1980s, when Jean-Pierre Taran, Douglas Greenhalgh, Marcus Aldén, and their fellow CARS enthusiasts and CARS pioneers launched a series of European CARS workshops (ECWs), the key idea behind this initiative was to promote CARS as a novel technique for combustion and flame diagnostics and to explore the potential of this process as a tool for quantitative measurements on automobile and rocket engines. Though it was already a number of years then since CARS had been first identified by Maker and Terhune 1 as an important nonlinear-optical phenomenon, CARS spectroscopy was still in its infancy, especially as far as practical applications and quantitative measurements were concerned. For many years, since the first ECW meeting in Harwell, UK, the ECW served as a forum for the discussion of novel concepts and technical advances in CARS spectroscopy, witnessing many brilliant presentations and discovering new names and talents in nonlinear spectroscopy and laser science.With CARS measurements on combustion and flames 2 becoming routine, new approaches and new developments made their way to the arena of ECWs. Femtosecond CARS and related wave-mixing techniques, emerging as leading-edge methods for time-resolved studies of ultrafast processes in physical, chemical, and biological systems, 3 brought ECWs to new, unexplored territories, inspiring a new generation of CARS researchers for new discoveries on the femtosecond time scale. 4,5 It was then that many of us suddenly realized how much fun CARS is, with multiple delay times introduced between the laser pulses adding

Advances in nonlinear optical spectroscopies: a historical perspective of developments and applications presented at ECONOS

“…[182,183] Zheltikov demonstrated the potential of a PCF-based light source for CARS and two-photon-resonant sumfrequency generation experiments. [184] The possibilities of frequency shifting and pulse shaping with PCFs were studied for applications in four-wave mixing spectroscopy by Linik et al [185] Moreover, a specially structured PCF enabled the generation of mode-separable supercontinuum emission. [186] The opportunities arising from the application of different spatial and spectral filtering approaches to tailor the output radiation for specific applications were laid out.…”