ABSTRACT
The science and technology of ultrafast pulses has, in recent years, come of age, becoming ever more important in the real world. In the early days of lasers, efforts concentrated on getting lasers to operate as continuous light sources. The advantages of having lasers operating with very short pulses are currently being realized more and more in both industry and science. In a nonlinear system, the output power has to scale nonlinearly with input power. Optical nonlinearities are important building blocks in optoelectronic devices, which have a variety of different applications as optical switches. With the high intensities of laser sources, an all-optical nonlinear regime can easily be reached. The higher the peak power, the more pronounced the nonlinear behavior of certain optical materials. In the high-peak-power regime, the response of optical materials starts to react nonlinearly, both in amplitude and phase, with incident optical power.
