This book presents the latest advances in ultrafast science, including ultrafast laser and measurement technology as well as studies of ultrafast phenomena. Pico- and femtosecond processes relevant in physics, chemistry, biology and engineering are presented. Ultrafast technology has had a profound impact in a wide range of applications, among them imaging, material diagnostics and transformation and high-speed optoelectronics. This book summarizes the results presented at the 12th Ultrafast Phenomena Conference and reviews the state of the art of this important and rapidly advancing field.

Inhalt

I: Coherent Control.- The Odyssey of Kent Wilson: Holding Molecules in the Light.- The Kent Wilson Group in the 1990s.- Algorithms for Closed Loop Ultrafast Control of Quantum Dynamics.- Control of Quantum Dynamics by Adaptive Femtosecond Pulse Shaping.- Optimal Control of Two-Photon Transitions: Bright and Dark Femtosecond Pulses Designed by a Self-Learning Algorithm.- Feedback Optimization of Molecular States Using a Parametrization in Frequency and Time Domain.- Controlling and Probing Impulsively Induced Ground State Vibrational Dynamics.- Dynamics and Coherent Control of Condensed Phase Vibrational Coherences.- Spatiotemporal Coherent Control.- Coherent Control and Nonlinear Interactions of Semiconductor Cavity Polaritons.- Coherent Control of XUV Radiation.- Enhancement of k? Yield from Femtosecond Laser Produced Plasmas by Automated Control of Plasma Parameters.- II: Lasers for Ultrashort Pulses.- Challenges and Limitations on Generating Few Cycle Laser Pulses Directly from Oscillators.- Extremely Flexible and Accurate Chirp-Compensation for 75-MHz Repetitive Glass-Fiber Output of a More-Than 100-THz Bandwidth: Generation of a-Few4Optical-Cycle Transform-Limited Pulses.- 14-fs Pulses at 1.3-µm Generated from an All-Solid-State Cr:Forsterite Laser.- Smooth Dispersion Compensation: Novel Chirped Mirrors with Suppressed Dispersion Oscillations.- Dispersion Management over one Octave with Tilted-Front-Interface Chirped Mirrors.- A Prism-Pair-Formed Pulse Shaper Compresses Optical Pulses to the 6 fs Regime.- Correcting the Failure of the Slowly Varying Amplitude Approximation for Short Pulses.- Precise Control of the Pulse-to-Pulse Carrier-Envelope Phase in a Mode-Locked Laser.- Carrier Envelope Offset Phase Stabilization for Few-Cycle Nonlinear Optics.- Sub-10 fs Light Pulses with Stabilized Carrier-Envelope Phase: Optical Waveform Synthesis.- Frequency Domain Control of Femtosecond Pulse Trains with Fabry-Perot Reference Cavities for Optical Frequency Metrology.- Nonlinear Optcal Method for Determining the Absolute Carrier Phase of a Laser Pulse.- Generation of Relativistic Intensity Pulses at 300 Hz Repetition Rate.- Reflection Double Pass Ti:Sapphire Continuous-Wave Amplifier Delivering 5.77 W Average Power, 82 MHz Repetition Rate, 100 fs Pulse.- Chirped Pulse Amplification for Ultraviolet Femtosecond Pulses Using Ce:LiCAF Crystal.- Parabolic Pulses from Yb:Fiber Amplifiers: A New Paradigm for High Power Ultrashort Pulse Generation.- Generation, Amplification and Characterization of Tunable Visible Ultrashort Shaped Pulses.- Synthesis of Supershort UV Pulses Using Phase-Locked Raman Side-Band Generation.- Generation and Measurement of Ultrafast Tunable VUV Light.- III: Pulse Characterization, Shaping and Measurement Techniques.- Autocorrelation Measurement of Femtosecond Optical Pulses Using Two-Photon-Induced Photocurrent in a Photomultiplier Tube.- Precision and Accuracy of Ultrashort Optical Pulse Measurement Using SPIDER.- Highly Simplified Ultrashort Pulse Measurement.- Time-Gated FROG: A New Technique for Studying the Build-Up of Optical Pulse Field in Mode-Locked Ultrafast Lasers.- Measuring the Intensity and Phase of Ultrabroadband Continuum.- Amplitude and Phase Measurement of Mid-IR Femtosecond Pulses Using XFROG.- Rapid Retrieval of Ultrashort Pulse Amplitude and Phase from a Sonogram Trace.- Simultaneous Two-Dimensional Space and Time Measurement of Ultrashort Optical Pulses Based on Spatial Spectral Interferometry.- Reliability of Fourier-Transform Spectral Interferometry.- Direct Measurement of Spectral Phase of Femtosecond Pulses Using Optical Parametric Effect.- Ultrashort Pulse Characterization by Frequency Resolved Pump Probe.- Attosecond Cross Correlation Technique.- Unbalanced Multiphoton Autocorrelation Techniques for fs Pulse Measurements in the Near IR.- Unbalanced Third-Order Correlations for Characterizing the Intensity and Phase of Femtosecond Pulses.- Spectral Phase Correlator for Coded Waveform Recognition Using Second Harmonic Generation.- Femtosecond Nonlinear Polarization Evolution from Cascade Quadratic Processes.- Femtosecond Polarization Detection Using High-Speed Pulse Shaping.- Tunable Third-Order Dispersion of a Prismatic Pulse Compressor.- Nonlinear Dispersion Properties of Sub-Wavelength Photonic Crystals.- Carrier-Induced Optical Pulse Shaping in a Semiconductor Nonlinear Bragg Reflector.- 20-fs Pulse Shaping with a 512-Element Phase only Liquid Crystal Modulator.- Coherently Controlled Shaping of Ultrafast Electric-Field Transients in the Mid-Infrared.- Spatial Replenishment and Self-Focusing Dynamics of Ultrashort Laser Pulses.- Femtosecond Pulse Propagation in Optical Fibers.- Microcavity-Enhanced Surface-Emitted Second-Harmonic Generation for Signal Processing in the ps and fs Regimes.- Femtosecond Time-Resolved Fluorescence Spectroscopy Utilizing Optical Kerr Shutter: Direct Observation of a Temporal Fluorescence Band Shape.- IV: THz Generation and Measurement.- An intense Broadband Terahertz Source Based on a Novel Four-Wave Rectification Process.- THz Generation by Photo-Ionization of Electrically Biased Air.- Coherent THz Emission from Optically Pumped Intersubband Plasmons in Parabolic Quantum Wells.- Narrow-Band Terahertz Wavetrains Generated by Optical Rectification in Periodically-Poled Lithium Niobate.- Optimum Geometrical Conditions for Femtosecond Laser Irradiated Magnetic-Field Enhanced THz Radiation In As Emitter and its Saturation Effect in High-Magnetic Field.- Tunable Coherent far Infrared Radiation Emission from Biased Semiconductor Microcavities.- Amplitude and Phase Resolved Detection of Tunable Femtosecond Pulses with Frequency Components Beyond 100 THz.- Ultrabroadband Detection of THz Radiation by LT-GaAs Photoconductive Antenna Gated with 15-fs Pulses.- A Simple Terahertz Spectrometer.- Ultrafast Applications of THz Waveguides.- Variable Angle Impulse Ranging and Image Reconstruction of Dielectric Cylinders.- Dielectric Property Measurement of Sub-Micron Thin Film by Differential Time-Domain Spectroscopy.- Excitation Dynamics Beyond the Slowly Varying Envelope Approximation.- THz-Pulse Studies of Superluminal Propagation in Frustrated Total Internal Teflection.- V: Imaging and Microscopy.- Optical Coherence Tomography for Biomedical Imaging.- Ultrahigh Resolution OCT Using Continuuum Generation in an Air-Silica Microstructure Optical Fiber.- Intracellular Water Diffusion Probed by Femtosecond Nonlinear CARS Microscopy.- Ultrafast Near-Field Pump-Probe Spectroscopy of Quasi-One-Dimensional Transport in a Single Quantum Wire.- Femtosecond Near-Field Scanning Optical Microscopy of Molecular Thin Films.- Background-Free THz Imaging Using Interferometric Tomography.- Diagnosis of Dental Cavity and Osteoporosis Using Terahertz Transmission Images.- VI: X-Ray Generation and Diffraction, Higher Harmonics, High Intensity Physics.- Femtosecond X-Ray Pulses from a Synchrotron.- Direct Observation of Ultrafast Non-Thermal Melting by Ultrafast X-Ray Diffraction.- Time-Resolved X-Ray Diffraction Study of Ultrafast Acoustic Phonon Dynamics in Ge/Si Heterostructures.- Picosecond Time-Resolved X-Ray Diffraction from a Silicon Crystal under Laser-Induced Breakdown.- Time-Resolved X-Ray Measurements of Polaron Dynamics of Charge-Ordered Nd1/2Sr1/2MnO3.- High-Order harmonic Generation in…