This book presents the latest advances in ultrafast science, including both ultrafast optical technology and the study of ultrafast phenomena. It covers picosecond, femtosecond, and attosecond processes relevant to applications in physics, chemistry, biology, and engineering. Ultrafast technology has a profound impact in a wide range of applications, amongst them biomedical imaging, chemical dynamics, frequency standards, material processing, and ultrahigh-speed communications. This book summarizes the results presented at the 19th International Conference on Ultrafast Phenomena and provides an up-to-date view of this important and rapidly advancing field.
This book reviews recent advances in experimental and theoretical understanding of phenomena on the picosecond and femtosecond time scales. The technology and applications in this field have shown remarkable progress recently. It is now possible to produce and measure pulses much shorter than 10 fs, which is approaching the inherent limit, in the visible region. Improvements in wavelength range, power levels and other performance parameters are also reported. These high-performance light sources are being used to study ultrafast phenomena in physical, chemical and biological systems and in artificial devices. The recent results reported and reviewed in this book provide a picture of the current status of the field.
The first Optical Society of America (OSA) Topical Meeting on Picosec ond Phenomena, held at Hilton Head, South Carolina, in 1978, brought together in a congenial setting an interdisciplinary group of laser engineers and physicists who were exploring the emerging technologies for generat ing and applying picosecond optical pulses, together with scientists from the fields of chemistry, physics, biology, and electronics who saw in those pulses capabilities for studying atomic and molecular phenomena on time scales previously unrealizable. The technology in this field has since developed even more rapidly and remarkably than foreseen eight years ago, and the applications to science and technology, in physics, chemistry, biology, electronics, and commu nications, have proven to be equally extraordinary. Optical pulses with pulse widths shorter than 10 femtosecond - only a few optical cycles in du ration - along with mono cycle infrared pulses, complex nonlinear optical solitons, electrooptic techniques with subpicosecond time resolutions, and a full toolkit of measurement and detection techniques have now emerged, including new methods for making ultrafast measurements in some cases even without ultrafast optical pulses. These tools are now being widely applied to study the internal motions of complex molecules and atomic lat tices, the relaxation times of superheated electrons in solids, the ultrafast dynamics of chemical reactions, the excited-state lifetimes of photosyn thetic and visual pigments, and the response times of the fastest electronic circuits yet developed.
