Laser Pulse Shaping Techniques Ranging from Mid-IR to UV

and

Ultrafast Charge Transfer Spectroscopy

Elmar Schreiber

Center for Ultrafast Laser Applications

Department of Chemistry,

Princeton, NJ 08544

The Shaping of ultrafast laser pulses is of increasing interest in a wide variety of optical applications, including quantum and optimal control, high speed communications and material characterization. Usually, pulse shaping is performed as a final step, although this mostly introduces significant energy losses. At Princeton, we presented for the first time, the amplification of non-trivially shaped pulses by a nonlinear optical parametric amplification process conserving the pulses phase and amplitude profile [Opt. Lett. 26 (2001) 1812]. Including high resolution parametric transfer techniques we generate shaped pulses ranging from IR [Opt. Lett., in press] to UV. An amazing tool based on difference-frequency mixing of chirped pulses –allowing e.g. state selective time-resolved vibrational spectroscopy- will be discussed [JOSA B, in press]. Finally, the ultrafast charge transfer dynamics of trinuclear mixed-valence complexes will be presented. This prototype system reveals a strong solvent-dependence of the back electron transfer lifetime