The papers in this volume cover the major areas of research activity in the field of ultrafast optics at the present time, and they have been selected to provide an overview of the current state of the art. The purview of the field is the methods for the generation, amplification, and characterization of electromagnetic pulses with durations from the pieo-to the attosecond range, as well as the technical issues surrounding the application of these pulses in physics, chemistry, and biology. The contributions were solicited from the participants in the Ultrafast Optics IV Conference, held in Vienna, Austria, in June 2003. The purpose of the conference is similar to that of this book: to provide a forum for the latest advances in ultrafast optical technology. Ultrafast light sources provide a means to observe and manipulate events on the scale of atomic and molecular dynamics. This is possible either through appropriate shaping of the time-dependent electrie field, or through the ap­ plication of fields whose strength is comparable to the binding forces of the electrons in atoms and molecules. Recent advances discussed here include the generation of pulses shorter than two optical cycles, and the ability to measure and to shape them in all degrees of freedom with unprecedented 2 21 2 precision, and to amplify them to the Zettawatt/cm (10 W /cm ) range.

Inhalt

Part I

Generation of Femtosecond Laser Pulses:Compact Femtosecond Oscillators

Novel 10- to 40-GHz Telecom Pulse Generating Sources with High Average Power

Single-Cycle Optical Pulses Produced by Coherent MolecularOscillations

A Robust New Concept for Octave-Spanning Chirped Mirrors with Minimal Dispersion Ripple

10-fs, Diode-Pumped Cr:LiCAF Laser

Broadband Phase-Coherent Optical Frequency Synthesis With Actively Linked Ti:Sapphire and Cr:Forsterite Femtosecond Lasers

Synthesis of Optical Frequencies and Ultrastable Femtosecond Pulse Trains from an Optical Reference Oscillator

Generation of 14.8-fs Pulses in a Spatially Dispersive Ampli.er

A Sub-10-Femtosecond Terawatt-Scale Ti:sapphire Laser System

Direct Generation of 12-fs Pulses from a Ti:sapphire Chirped-Pulse Ampli.cation System

Generation of 3.8 Fs Pulses Through Adaptive Cascaded Hollow Fiber Compression

Generation and Characterization of 3.4-fs Optical Pulses with

Over-One-Octave Bandwidth

Part II

Measurement and Shaping of Femtosecond Pulses Acousto-Optic Spectral Filtering of Femtosecond Laser Pulses

Adaptive Femtosecond Quantum Control

Measuring Spatial Chirp and Pulse-Front Tilt in Ultrashort Pulses Using Single-Shot FROG

Measurements of Ultracomplex and Ultraweak Pulses with

FROG

Few-cycle Pulse Diagnostics Using Plateau Harmonics

Part III

Measurement and Control of the Carrier-Envelope Phase

Carrier-Envelope Phase Stabilization of Modelocked Lasers

Frontiers of Carrier-Envelope Stabilization Schemes for Femtosecond Oscillators

Direct Locking of the Carrier-Envelope Phase of Femtosecond Laser Pulses

Ultrafast-Laser Stabilization with Application to Pulse

Ampli.cation by Use of Passive Optical Cavities

Solid-State Carrier-Envelope Phase Detector

Selection of Pulses Having a Constant Carrier-Envelope Phase from a Relatively Noisy Mode-Locked Oscillator

Carrier Envelope Phase Measurement Using a Non Phase Stable Laser

Stabilization and Characterization of the Carrier-Envelope Phase in Intense Few-Cycle Pulses

Measurement of the Absolute Phase of few-Cycle Laser Pulses

Part IV

Extreme UV Radiation and Sub-Femtosecond Pulses :Quasi-Phase-Matching of High Harmonic EUV Generation at Very High Ionization Levels

Enhancement and Tuning of High-Order HarmonicGeneration Using Adaptive Pulse Shaping

Multilayer EUV Optics for Applications of Ultrashort High Harmonic Pulses

Absolute-Phase E.ects of Few-Optical-Cycle Light Pulses inSingle-Shot High Order Harmonic Spectra

Reproducible Generation and Measurement of Isolated Sub-fs XUV Pulses with Phase-Controlled Few-Cycle Light

Controlling High-Harmonic Generation via Molecular Alignment

Towards Attosecond Half-Cycle Pulses

Temporal Characterization of Attosecond Pulses

Techniques for Temporal Characterization of Ultrafast XUV Radiation

Characterization of Attosecond Electromagnetic Pulses

Characterization of Attosecond Laser Pulses UsingAngle-resolved Photoelectron Spectroscopy

Part V

Ultraintense Pulses, Hard X-Ray Generation and Particle Acceleration

Isolated Attosecond Pulse Generation in the Relativistic Regime by Re.ection/De.ection/Compression

Diode-Pumped Regenerative Ampli.er Front End for the Petawatt Laser Chain at LULI

The Petawatt Laser Glass Chain at LULI: Technical Issues and First Results

High Repetition Rate Femtosecond Laser Driven Hard X-Ray Source and its Application for Di.raction Experiments

Generation, Amplitude and Phase Characterization of1021W/cm2 Intensity

Ultrafast Hard X-Rays from Electron Accelerators

Ampli.cation of Multikilovolt Xe(L) Hollow Atom Transitions with Xe Clusters in Con.ned Plasma Channels

Asymmetric Pulse Shapes in Grating-Based CPA Compressors and Optimal Electron Acceleration in Plasmas

Part VI

Ultrafast Nonlinear Optics Progress in Chirped Pulse Optical Parametric Ampli.ers

Optical Parametric Chirped-Pulse Ampli.cation in Periodically-Poled KTiOPO4 at 1053 nm

Nonlinear Phase-Locking of Parametric Optical Processes:the Sliding Resonance E.ect

Low Threshold, High Repetition Frequency, Femtosecond Optical Parametric Oscillator Based on Chirped-Pulse Frequency Conversion

Broadband Sum-Frequency Mixing for Indirect Phase Control of UV Pulses With a Sub-20-Fs TW-Class Ti:Sapphire Laser System

New Generation of Photoconductive Few-Cycle Terahertz Emitters

Magnetic-Field Induced Enhancement of THz-Radaiation from InAs Irradiated with 0.8 µm Laser up to 27 T and InSb Irradiated with 1.56 µm Laser up to 5 T

Part VII

Novel Applications of Ultrashort Light Pulses Ultrafast Electron Di.raction

Some Medical and Biological Applications of Ultrafast Lasers

Adaptive Control of Two-Photon Excitation of Green Fluorescent Protein with Shaped Femtosecond Pulses

Femtosecond Electron Optics: Towards Atomically Resolved Transition States

Application of High-Harmonic Radiation for EUV Interferometry and Spectroscopy

Time-Resolved Inner Shell Spectroscopy with Sub-fs EUV Pulses

A Quantum Theory of Time-Resolved Auger Measurement

Laser Induced Nuclear Reactions