Ultrafast Supercontinuum Generation in Transparent Solid-State Media

Preface

Introduction

Part I. Physical picture of supercontinuum generation

Chapter 1. Governing physical effects

                1.1. Self-focusing of laser beams

                1.2. Self-phase modulation of laser pulses

                1.3. Nonlinear absorption and ionization

                1.4. Plasma effects

                1.4.2. Refractive index change

                1.4.3. Plasma induced phase modulation

                1.4.4. The Drude-Lorentz model

                1.5. Intensity clamping

                1.6. Chromatic dispersion

                1.7. Self-steepening and space-time focusing

                1.8. Four wave mixing and phase matching

                1.9. Conical emission

Chapter 2. Femtosecond filamentation in solid state media

                2.1. Universal features

                2.2. Numerical model

                2.3. Supercontinuum generation under normal GVD

                2.4. Supercontinuum generation under anomalous GVD

                2.5. Supercontinuum generation under near zero GVD

                2.6. Comparison with supercontinuum generation in a fiber

Part 2. Overview of the experimental results

Chapter 3. General practical considerations

                3.1. Materials

                3.2. Numerical aperture

                3.3. Stability issues

                3.4. Focusing-defocusing cycles

                3.5. Multiple filamentation

Chapter 4. Experimental results

                4.1. Water as prototypical nonlinear medium

                4.2. Glasses

                4.3. Alkali metal fluorides

                4.4. Laser hosts

                4.5. Crystals possessing second-order nonlinearity

                4.6. Semiconductors

                4.7. Other nonlinear media

Chapter 5. New developments

                5.1. Power and energy scaling

                5.2. Pulse compression

                5.3. Supercontinuum generation with picosecond laser pulses

                5.4. Supercontinuum generation with non-Gaussian beams

5.5. Control of supercontinuum generation

References