Femtosecond Laser Spectroscopy

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xx

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2. Phase Controlled Femtosecond Lasers for Sensitive, Precise, and Wide Bandwidth Nonlinear Spectroscopy

   • Jun Ye

   Pages 1-27

3. Supercontinuum and High-Order Harmonics

   • Marco Bellini

   Pages 29-60

4. The Measurement of Ultrashort Light — Simple Devices, Complex Pulses

   • Xun Gu, Selcuk Akturk, Aparna Shreenath, Qiang Cao, Rick Trebino

   Pages 61-86

5. Femtosecond Combs for Precision Metrology

   • S. N. Bagayev, V. I. Denisov, V. M. Klementyev, I. I. Korel, S. A. Kuznetsov, V. S. Pivtsov et al.

   Pages 87-108

6. Infrared Precision Spectroscopy Using Femtosecond-Laser-Based Optical Frequency-Comb Synthesizers

   • P. De Natale, P. Cancio, D. Mazzotti

   Pages 109-132

7. Real-Time Spectroscopy of Molecular Vibrations with Sub-5-Fs Visible Pulses

   • Takayoshi Kobayashi

   Pages 133-165

8. Vibrational Echo Correlation Spectroscopy

   • John B. Asbury, Tobias Steinel, M. D. Fayer

   Pages 167-196

9. Spectrally Resolved Two-Colour Femtosecond Photon Echoes

   • Lap van Dao, Craig Lincoln, Martin Lowe, Peter Hannaford

   Pages 197-224

10. Optimal Control of Atomic, Molecular and Electron Dynamics with Tailored Femtosecond Laser Pulses

    • Tobias Brixner, Thomas Pfeifer, Gustav Gerber, Matthias Wollenhaupt, Thomas Baumert

    Pages 225-266

11. Coherent Control of Atomic Dynamics with Chirped and Shaped Pulses

    • Béatrice Chatel, Bertrand Girard

    Pages 267-304

12. Ultrafast Processes in Highly Excited Wide-Gap Dielectric Thin Films

    • M. Mero, J. Zeller, W. Rudolph

    Pages 305-329

13. Back Matter

    Pages 331-334

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The embryonic development of femtoscience stems from advances made in the generation of ultrashort laser pulses. Beginning with mode-locking of glass lasers in the 1960s, the development of dye lasers brought the pulse width down from picoseconds to femtoseconds. The breakthrough in solid state laser pulse generation provided the current reliable table-top laser systems capable of average power of about 1 watt, and peak power density of easily watts per square centimeter, with pulse widths in the range of four to eight femtoseconds. Pulses with peak power density reaching watts per square centimeter have been achieved in laboratory settings and, more recently, pulses of sub-femtosecond duration have been successfully generated. As concepts and methodologies have evolved over the past two decades, the realm of ultrafast science has become vast and exciting and has impacted many areas of chemistry, biology and physics, and other fields such as materials science, electrical engineering, and optical communication. In molecular science the explosive growth of this research is for fundamental reasons. In femtochemistry and femtobiology chemical bonds form and break on the femtosecond time scale, and on this scale of time we can freeze the transition states at configurations never before seen. Even for n- reactive physical changes one is observing the most elementary of molecular processes. On a time scale shorter than the vibrational and rotational periods the ensemble behaves coherently as a single-molecule trajectory.

• laser
• laser spectroscopy
• laser technology
• spectroscopy
• thin films

• Centre for Atom Optics and Ultrafast Spectroscopy, Swinburne University of Technology, Hawthorn, Victoria, Australia

  Peter Hannaford

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