Ultrafast Lasers

Covering high-energy ultrafast amplifiers and solid-state, fiber, and diode lasers, this reference examines recent developments in high-speed laser technology. It presents a comprehensive survey of ultrafast laser technology, its applications, and future trends in various scientific and industrial areas. Topics include: micromachining applications for metals, dielectrics, and biological tissue; advanced electronics and semiconductor processing; optical coherence tomography; multiphoton microscopy; optical sampling and scanning; THz generation and imaging; optical communication systems; absolute phase control of optical signals; and more.

Covering high-energy ultrafast amplifiers and solid-state, fiber, and diode lasers, this reference examines recent developments in high-speed laser technology. It presents a comprehensive survey of ultrafast laser technology, its applications, and future trends in various scientific and industrial areas. Topics include: micromachining applications

This textbook presents a comprehensive introduction to ultrafast laser physics with a keen awareness of the needs of graduate students. It is self-contained and ready to use for both ultrafast laser courses and background for experimental investigation in the lab. The book starts with an advanced introduction to linear and nonlinear pulse propagation, details Q-switching and modelocking and goes into detail while explaining ultrashort pulse generation and measurement. Finally, the characterization of the laser signals is illustrated, and a broad range of applications presented. A multitude of worked examples and problems with solutions help to deepen the reader's understanding.

The laser has revolutionized many areas of science and society, providing bright and versatile light sources that transform the ways we investigate science and enables trillions of dollars of commerce. Now a second laser revolution is underway with pulsed petawatt-class lasers (1 petawatt: 1 million billion watts) that deliver nearly 100 times the total world's power concentrated into a pulse that lasts less than one-trillionth of a second. Such light sources create unique, extreme laboratory conditions that can accelerate and collide intense beams of elementary particles, drive nuclear reactions, heat matter to conditions found in stars, or even create matter out of the empty vacuum. These powerful lasers came largely from U.S. engineering, and the science and technology opportunities they enable were discussed in several previous National Academies' reports. Based on these advances, the principal research funding agencies in Europe and Asia began in the last decade to invest heavily in new facilities that will employ these high-intensity lasers for fundamental and applied science. No similar programs exist in the United States. Opportunities in Intense Ultrafast Lasers assesses the opportunities and recommends a path forward for possible U.S. investments in this area of science.

This book describes the application of ultrafast laser science and technology in materials and processing relevant to industry today, including ultrafast laser ablation where fundamental studies have led to the development of the world's first femtosecond photomask repair tool. Semiconductor manufacturing companies worldwide use the tool to repair photomask defects, saving hundreds of millions in production costs. The most up-to-date ultrafast laser technologies are described and methods to generate high harmonics for photoelectron spectroscopy of industrially important materials are covered, with an emphasis on practical laboratory implementation. Basic device physics merged with photoemission studies from single- and polycrystalline materials are described. Extensions to new methods for extracting key device properties of metal-oxide-semiconductor structures, including band offsets, effective work functions, semiconductor band bending and defect-related charging in a number of technologically important gate oxides are detailed. Polycrystalline photovoltaic materials and heterostructures as well as organic light emitting materials are covered. This book describes both the history, and most recent applications of ultrafast laser science to industrially relevant materials, processes and devices.

In this monograph, the authors address the physics and engineering together with the latest achievements of efficient and compact ultrafast lasers based on novel quantum-dot structures and devices. Their approach encompasses a broad range of laser systems, while taking into consideration not only the physical and experimental aspects but also the much needed modeling tools, thus providing a holistic understanding of this hot topic.

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.