Angular dispersion: an enabling tool in nonlinear and quantum optics

作者：Torres Juan P^*; Hendrych Martin; Valencia Alejandra

来源：Advances in Optics and Photonics, 2010, 2(3): 319-369.

DOI：10.1364/AOP.2.000319

The dispersive properties of materials, i.e., their frequency-dependent response to the interaction with light, in most situations determines whether an optical process can he observed. Although one can always search for a specific material with the sought-after properties, this material might be far from optimum or might not even exist. Therefore, it is of great interest to develop methods that could tune the dispersive properties of a medium independently of the working frequency hand. Pulses with angular dispersion, or pulse-front tilt, precisely allow us to achieve this goal. In this tutorial, we show the basics of how angular dispersion can manage to tune the dispersion parameters that characterize the propagation of light in a medium, thus permitting the observation and application of various optical processes in nonlinear and quantum optics that could not be realized otherwise. To keep the focus on first principles, the list of topics addressed is not exhaustive. More specifically, we consider the role of angular dispersion for pulse stretching and compression, broadband second-harmonic generation, the generation of temporal solitons in nonlinear chi((2)) media, the tunable generation of terahertz waves by means of optical rectification of femtosecond pulses, and the tuning of the frequency correlations and of the bandwidth of entangled paired photons.

• 出版日期2010-9