No Arabic abstract
In its usual implementation, the Raman amplifier features only one pump carrier frequency. However, pulses with well-separated frequencies can also be Raman amplified while compressed in time. Amplification with frequency-separated pumps is shown to hold even in the highly nonlinear, pump-depletion regime, as derived through a fluid model, and demonstrated via particle-in-cell (PIC) simulations. The resulting efficiency is similar to single-frequency amplifiers, but, due to the beat-wave waveform of both the pump lasers and the amplified seed pulses, these amplifiers feature higher seed intensities with a shorter spike duration. Advantageously, these amplifiers also suffer less noise backscattering, because the total fluence is split between the different spectral components.
Backward Raman amplification is limited by relativistic nonlinear dephasing resulting in saturation of the leading spike of the amplified pulse. Pump detuning is employed to mitigate the relativistic phase mismatch and to overcome the associated saturation. The amplified pulse can then be reshaped into a mono-spike pulse with little precursory power ahead of it, with the maximum intensity increasing by a factor of two. This detuning can be employed advantageously both in regimes where the group velocity dispersion is unimportant and where the dispersion is important but small.
We propose to amplify and compress an ultrashort Light Spring laser seed with a long Gaussian-shaped laser pump through Raman amplification. This Light Spring, which has a helical spatio-temporal intensity profile, can be built on the superposition of three distinct laser frequency components. In order to get an independent frequency amplification, two criteria are established. Besides these criteria, a non equal frequency separation is necessary to avoid resonance overlapping when three or more frequencies are involved. The independent set of equations, which describes the wave-wave interaction in a plasma, is solved numerically for two different Light Spring configurations. In both cases, the amplification and transversal compression of the seed laser pulse have been observed, with a final profile similar to that of the usual Gaussian-shaped seed pulses. In addition, two different kinds of helical plasma waves are excited.
Compression of an intense laser pulse using backward Raman amplification (BRA) in plasma, followed by vacuum focusing to a small spot size, can produce unprecedented ultrarelativistic laser intensities. The plasma density inhomogeneity during BRA, however, causes laser phase and amplitude distortions, limiting the pulse focusability. To solve the issue of distortion, we investigate the use of optical phase conjugation as the seed pulse for BRA. We show that the phase conjugated laser pulses can retain focusability in the nonlinear pump-depletion regime of BRA, but not so easily in the linear amplification regime. This somewhat counter-intuitive result is because the nonlinear pump-depletion regime features a shorter amplification distance, and hence less phase distortion due to wave-wave interaction, than the linear amplification regime.
We demonstrate that halogenated methane 2D-Terahertz Terahertz Raman (2D-TTR) spectra are determined by the complicated structure of the instrument response function (IRF) along $f_1$ and by the molecular coherences along $f_2$. Experimental improvements have helped increase the resolution and dynamic range of the measurements, including accurate THz pulse shape characterization. Sum-frequency excitations convolved with the IRF are found to quantitatively reproduce the 2D-TTR signal. A new Reduced Density Matrix model which incorporates sum-frequency pathways, with linear and harmonic operators fully supports this (re)interpretation of the 2D-TTR spectra.
We experimentally demonstrate efficient Raman conversion to respective Stokes and anti-Stokes fields in both pulsed and continuous modes with a Rb-87 atomic vapor cell. The conversion efficiency is about 40-50% for the Stokes field and 20-30% for the anti-Stokes field, respectively. This conversion process is realized with feedback of both the Raman pump and the frequency-converted fields (Stokes or anti-Stokes). The experimental setup is very simple and can be applied easily to produce the light source with larger frequency difference using other Raman media. They may have wide applications in nonlinear optics, atomic physics, quantum optics and precise measurement.