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Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics

Generation of optical sub-cycle pulses and full Maxwell-Bloch solitary waves by coherent propagation effects

Vladimir P. Kalosha, Joachım Herrmann

Published Jan 20, 2003• 0 citations
Publisher

Abstract

Summary form only given. Recent advances in ultrafast laser technology have made possible the generation of extremely short and intense pulses with only two optical periods of less than 5 fs in duration in the visible region. Efforts for generation of still shorter pulses is motivated by the possibility to study light matter interactions under unique conditions as the pulse duration approaches the duration of a single optical cycle. We study the propagation of a 5-fs pulse through a layer of a dense medium of two-level systems. As a result we demonstrate the formation of single-cycle and half-cycle pulses in the sub-fs region and novel types of spectral changes during propagation as large blue and red shifts in the transmitted and reflected pulses, respectively, explained by intra-pulse frequency-difference mixing. Solitary pulse propagation phenomena beyond the limits of slowly-varying envelope (SVEA) and rotating-wave approximation (RWA) are illustrated as the formation of full Maxwell-Bloch half-cycle solitons and two-soliton pulses.

DOI
10.1109/cleo.1999.834164

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Summary form only given. Recent advances in ultrafast laser technology have made possible the generation of extremely short and intense pulses with only two optical periods of less than 5 fs in duration in the visible region. Efforts for generation of still shorter pulses is motivated by the possibility to study light matter interactions under unique conditions as the pulse duration approaches the duration of a single optical cycle. We study the propagation of a 5-fs pulse through a layer of a dense medium of two-level systems. As a result we demonstrate the formation of single-cycle and half-cycle pulses in the sub-fs region and novel types of spectral changes during propagation as large blue and red shifts in the transmitted and reflected pulses, respectively, explained by intra-pulse frequency-difference mixing. Solitary pulse propagation phenomena beyond the limits of slowly-varying envelope (SVEA) and rotating-wave approximation (RWA) are illustrated as the formation of full Maxwell-Bloch half-cycle solitons and two-soliton pulses.
We demonstrated that optical subcycle pulses can be generated in dense media of two-level systems due to pulse splitting and reshaping of pulses of a few optical-cycles time duration. Novel features in the spectral signatures of the pulses are predicted, a large blueshift in the transmitted and a large redshift in the reflected pulse, which are explained by intrapulse four-wave mixing. Solitary propagation phenomena in the full Maxwell-Bloch equations beyond the limits of slowly varying envelope and rotating-wave approximations are observed, e.g., the formation of solitary half-cycle pulses and two-soliton pulses.
We demonstrate that a single subcycle optical pulse can be generated when a pulse with a few optical cycles penetrates through resonant two-level dense media with a subwavelength structure. The single-cycle gap soliton phenomenon in the full Maxwell-Bloch equations without the frame of the slowly varying envelope and rotating wave approximations is observed. Our study shows that the subwavelength structure can be used to suppress the frequency shift caused by intrapulse four-wave mixing in continuous media and supports the formation of single-cycle gap solitons even in the case when the structure period breaks the Bragg condition. This suggests a way toward shortening high-intensity laser fields to few- and even single-cycle pulse durations.
Recent progress in ultrafast technology has led to the generation of optical pulses as short as 8 fs. The propagation of such short pulses in nonlinear optical media requires new computational techniques in which the standard approximations such as the slowly-varying envelope approximation (SVEA) and rotating-wave approximation (RWA) are not made while using the Maxwell-Bloch equations [1]. Previous calculations, which used the finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) method, found that for a a Kerr-like instantaneous nonlinearity [2] significant differences can occur when the full vector Maxwell equations are used instead of the nonlinear Schrodinger equation. Recently, the FDTD method has been extended to the case of a homogeneously broadened two-level atomic system [3].
We theoretically investigate the propagation of few-cycle laser pulses in resonant two-level dense media with a subwavelength structure, which is described by the full Maxwell—Bloch equations without the frame of slowly varying envelope and rotating wave approximations. The input pulses can be shaped into shorter ones with a single or less than one optical cycle. The effect of the parameters of the subwavelength structure and laser pulses is studied. Our study shows that the media with a subwavelength structure can significantly shape the few-cycle pulses into a subcycle pulse, even for the case of chirp pulses as input fields. This suggests that such subwavelength structures have potential application in the shaping of few-cycle laser pulses.
A theoretical investigation on the coherent control of optical transient four-wave mixing interactions in two-level systems with two intense few-cycle propagating laser pulses of central angular frequencies $\ensuremath{\omega}$ and $3\ensuremath{\omega}$ is reported. By numerically solving the full Maxwell-Bloch equations beyond the slowly varying envelope and rotating-wave approximations in the time domain, the nonlinear coupling to the optical field at frequency $5\ensuremath{\omega}$ is found to depend critically on the initial relative phase $\ensuremath{\phi}$ of the propagating pulses: the coupling is enhanced when the pulses interfere constructively in the center $(\ensuremath{\phi}=0)$, while it is nearly suppressed when they are out of phase $(\ensuremath{\phi}=\ensuremath{\pi})$.
We reveal the existence of an optical self-induced-transparency soliton family in a two-level absorbing system down to the few-cycle limit. Based on the few-cycle envelope approximation, we introduce a systematical method of reducing the Maxwell-Bloch equations beyond the slowly varying envelope approximation and characterize the parameter space to achieve slow and fast lights. Verified by direct numerical simulations with full vectorial Maxwell-Bloch equations, we also give the relationships for a number of optical cycles on area theory and pulse group velocity, which demonstrate possible coherent photon-matter interactions.