No Arabic abstract
Optical oscillators present a powerful optimization mechanism. The inherent competition for the gain resources between possible modes of oscillation entails the prevalence of the most efficient single mode. We harness this ultrafast coherent feedback to optimize an optical field emph{in time}, and show that when an optical oscillator based on a molecular gain medium is synchronously-pumped by ultrashort pulses, a temporally coherent multi mode field can develop that optimally dumps a general, dynamically-evolving vibrational wave-packet, into a emph{single vibrational target state}. Measuring the emitted field opens a new window to visualization and control of fast molecular dynamics. The realization of such a coherent oscillator with hot alkali dimers appears within experimental reach.
We describe the application of Raman Optical-fiber Amplification (ROA) for the phase coherent transfer of optical frequencies in an optical fiber link. ROA uses the transmission fiber itself as a gain medium for bi-directional coherent amplification. In a test setup we evaluated the ROA in terms of on-off gain, signal-to-noise ratio, and phase noise added to the carrier. We transferred a laser frequency in a 200 km optical fiber link with an additional 16 dB fixed attenuator (equivalent to 275 km of fiber on a single span), and evaluated both co-propagating and counter-propagating amplification pump schemes, demonstrating nonlinear effects limiting the co-propagating pump configuration. The frequency at the remote end has a fractional frequency instability of 3e-19 over 1000 s with the optical fiber link noise compensation.
Short laser pulses are widely used for controlling molecular rotational degrees of freedom and inducing molecular alignment, orientation, unidirectional rotation and other types of coherent rotational motion. To follow the ultra-fast rotational dynamics in real time, several techniques for producing molecular movies have been proposed based on the Coulomb explosion of rotating molecules, or recovering molecular orientation from the angular distribution of high-harmonics. The present work offers and demonstrates a novel non-destructive optical method for direct visualization and recording of movies of coherent rotational dynamics in a molecular gas. The technique is based on imaging the time-dependent polarization dynamics of a probe light propagating through a gas of coherently rotating molecules. The probe pulse continues through a radial polarizer, and is then recorded by a camera. We illustrate the technique by implementing it with two examples of time-resolved rotational dynamics: alignment-antialignment cycles in a molecular gas excited by a single linearly polarized laser pulse, and unidirectional molecular rotation induced by a pulse with twisted polarization. This method may open new avenues in studies on fast chemical transformation phenomena and ultrafast molecular dynamics caused by strong laser fields of various complexities.
Efficient, on-chip optical nonlinear processes are of great interest for the development of compact, robust, low-power consuming systems for applications in spectroscopy, metrology, sensing and classical and quantum optical information processing. Diamond holds promise for these applications, owing to its exceptional properties. However, although significant progress has been made in the development of an integrated diamond photonics platform, optical nonlinearities in diamond have not been explored much apart from Raman processes in bulk samples. Here, we demonstrate optical parametric oscillations (OPO) via four wave mixing (FWM) in single crystal diamond (SCD) optical networks on-chip consisting of waveguide-coupled microring resonators. Threshold powers as low as 20mW are enabled by ultra-high quality factor (1*10^6) diamond ring resonators operating at telecom wavelengths, and up to 20 new wavelengths are generated from a single-frequency pump laser. We also report the inferred nonlinear refractive index due to the third-order nonlinearity in diamond at telecom wavelengths.
We investigate the role of domain walls in the ultrafast magnon dynamics of an antiferromagnetic NiO single crystal in a pump-probe experiment with variable pump photon energy. Analysing the amplitude of the energy-dependent photo-induced ultrafast spin dynamics, we detect a yet unreported coupling between the materials characteristic THz- and a GHz-magnon modes. We explain this unexpected coupling between two orthogonal eigenstates of the corresponding Hamiltonian by modelling the magneto-elastic interaction between spins in different domains. We find that such interaction, in the non-linear regime, couples the two different magnon modes via the domain walls and it can be optically exploited via the exciton-magnon resonance.
Phase-stabilized 12-fs, 1-nJ pulses from a commercial Ti:sapphire oscillator are directly amplified in a chirped-pulse optical parametric amplifier and recompressed to yield near-transform-limited 17.3-fs pulses. The amplification process is demonstrated to be phase preserving and leads to 85-uJ, carrier-envelope-offset phase-locked pulses at 1 kHz for 0.9 mJ of pump, corresponding to a single-pass gain of 8.5 x 10^4.