ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews the propagation of time domain pulses through optical media, such as glasses, optical fibers, or nonlinear crystals, and special optical systems, such as stretchers or compressors, which are designed to modify time domain pulses in a very specific way. The chapter starts with the wave equation as it is commonly used in optics and as introduced in Chapter 1. The material equations are derived from a classical model of a driven oscillator in an anharmonic potential. Despite the simplicity of the model, it is sufficient to qualitatively explain a great number of effects in linear as well as in nonlinear optics. The entire chapter will be based on a one-dimensional propagation equation, that is, the results are applicable whenever the transverse beam size remains more or less constant as the pulse propagates through the dielectric material. We then proceed with more complex linear systems, which are typically composed of various optical elements and act on the temporal or spectral part of the electric field. To further illustrate the different effects, we show simulation results for 100-fs-long and 10-fs-long Gaussian-shaped time domain pulses, respectively; their center wavelength is
800 nm. All the simulations in this chapter have been performedwith the Lab2 simulation software [1].
