Spatio-temporal dynamics of single-cycle optical pulses and nonlinear frequency conversion

Abstract

We model propagation of initially single-cycle wave packet exhibiting paraxial spatial diffraction in a homogeneous isotropic dielectric medium with normal group velocity dispersion and instantaneous cubic nonlinearity. We show that for higher input intensity, the number of field oscillations is increased and the temporal spectrum shifts to shorter wavelengths in the axial beam part and to longer wavelengths at the periphery of the beam, and this is accompanied by the formation of closed surfaces of equal phase. We find that at tripled frequencies a minimum of spectral density forms at low spatial frequencies, which is characteristic for single-cycle pulses. At higher spatial frequencies, the maximum of the spectral density shifts to quadruple temporal frequencies.

Harmonic generation enhancement due to interaction of few-cycle light pulses in nonlinear dielectric coating on a mirror

“…Nonlinear optics of waves consisting from only few cycles of electromagnetic field is an active research field at the forefront of optics and laser physics of ultra short intense pulses [1,2,3]. Various nonlinear effects associated with the few-cycle pulses have been investigated, including their temporal and spectral broadening, self-focusing, nonlinear reflection, generation of single-cycle solitons, co-and counter-directional interactions [4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11]. Due to the lack of destruction of optical media in the field of intense extremely short pulses, the nonlinear effects can be significant, being beneficial to potential practical applications ranging from all-optical signal processing in integrated circuits to sum-frequency generation spectroscopy [12,13].…”

Evolution of the width of a one-and-a-half-cycle optical pulse in a nonlinear dielectric medium

“…They have a picosecond width in the far-IR region and an attosecond width in the UV region. A significant number of papers [4][5][6][7][8] are devoted to a study of the features of the propagation of such optical pulses that are ultrashort in the number of oscillations. For instance, it is shown in Ref.…”