Ultrashort lasers provide an important tool to probe the dynamics of physical systems at very short time-scales, allowing for improved understanding of the performance of many devices and phenomena ...used in science, technology, and medicine. In addition ultrashort pulses also provide a high peak intensity and a broad optical spectrum, which opens even more applications such as material processing, nonlinear optics, attosecond science, and metrology. There has been a long-standing, ongoing effort in the field to reduce the pulse duration and increase the power of these lasers to continue to empower existing and new applications. After 1990, new techniques such as semiconductor saturable absorber mirrors (SESAMs) and Kerr-lens mode locking (KLM) allowed for the generation of stable pulse trains from diode-pumped solid-state lasers for the first time, and enabled the performance of such lasers to improve by several orders of magnitude with regards to pulse duration, pulse energy and pulse repetition rates. This invited review article gives a broad overview and includes some personal accounts of the key events during the last 20 years, which made ultrafast solid-state lasers a success story. Ultrafast Ti:sapphire, diode-pumped solid-state, and novel semiconductor laser oscillators will be reviewed. The perspective for the near future indicates continued significant progress in the field.
Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the most common cause of death in industrialized countries. One underlying cause is atherosclerosis, which is a systemic disease characterized by plaques of retained ...lipids, inflammatory cells, apoptotic cells, calcium and extracellular matrix (ECM) proteins in the arterial wall. The biologic composition of an atherosclerotic plaque determines whether the plaque is more or less vulnerable, that is prone to rupture or erosion. Here, the ECM and tissue repair play an important role in plaque stability, vulnerability and progression. This review will focus on ECM remodelling in atherosclerotic plaques, with focus on how ECM biomarkers might predict plaque vulnerability and outcome.
Attosecond metrology of atoms has accessed the time scale of the most fundamental processes in quantum mechanics. Transferring the time-resolved photoelectric effect from atoms to molecules ...considerably increases experimental and theoretical challenges. Here we show that orientation- and energy-resolved measurements characterize the molecular stereo Wigner time delay. This observable provides direct information on the localization of the excited electron wave packet within the molecular potential. Furthermore, we demonstrate that photoelectrons resulting from the dissociative ionization process of the CO molecule are preferentially emitted from the carbon end for dissociative
Σ states and from the center and oxygen end for the
Π states of the molecular ion. Supported by comprehensive theoretical calculations, this work constitutes a complete spatially and temporally resolved reconstruction of the molecular photoelectric effect.
Short, intense laser pulses can be used to access the transition regime between classical and quantum optical responses in dielectrics. In this regime, the relative roles of inter- and intraband ...light-driven electronic transitions remain uncertain. We applied attosecond transient absorption spectroscopy to investigate the interaction between polycrystalline diamond and a few-femtosecond infrared pulse with intensity below the critical intensity of optical breakdown. Ab initio time-dependent density functional theory calculations, in tandem with a two-band parabolic model, accounted for the experimental results in the framework of the dynamical Franz-Keldysh effect and identified infrared induction of intraband currents as the main physical mechanism responsible for the observations.
Femtosecond modelocked lasers with multi-gigahertz pulse repetition rates are attractive sources for all applications that require individually resolvable frequency comb lines or high sampling rates. ...However, the modelocked laser architectures demonstrated so far have several issues, including the need for single-mode pump lasers, limited output power, Q-switching instabilities and challenging cavity geometries. Here, we introduce a technique that solves these issues. In a two-dimensionally patterned quasi-phase-matching (QPM) device, we create a large, low-loss self-defocusing nonlinearity, which simultaneously provides SESAM-assisted soliton modelocking in the normal dispersion regime and suppresses Q-switching induced damage. We demonstrate femtosecond passive modelocking at 10-GHz pulse repetition rates from a simple straight laser cavity, directly pumped by a low-cost highly spatially multimode pump diode. The 10.6-GHz Yb:CaGdAlO
(Yb:CALGO) laser delivers 166-fs pulses at 1.2 W of average output power. This enables a new class of femtosecond modelocked diode-pumped solid-state lasers with repetition rates at 10 GHz and beyond.
Dual-comb spectroscopy offers the potential for high accuracy combined with fast data acquisition. Applications are often limited, however, by the complexity of optical comb systems. Here we present ...dual-comb spectroscopy of water vapor using a substantially simplified single-laser system. Very good spectroscopy measurements with fast sampling rates are achieved with a free-running dual-comb mode-locked semiconductor disk laser. The absolute stability of the optical comb modes is characterized both for free-running operation and with simple microwave stabilization. This approach drastically reduces the complexity for dual-comb spectroscopy. Band-gap engineering to tune the center wavelength from the ultraviolet to the mid-infrared could optimize frequency combs for specific gas targets, further enabling dual-comb spectroscopy for a wider range of industrial applications.
The last decade has seen an intense renewed debate on tunnelling time, both from a theoretical and an experimental perspective. Here, we review recent developments and new insights in the field of ...strong-field tunnel ionization related to tunnelling time, and apply these findings to the interpretation of the attoclock experiment Landsman et al. Optica 2014, 1, 343. We conclude that models including finite tunnelling time are consistent with recent experimental measurements.
Abbreviations: A: adiabatic; ADK: Ammosov, Delone and Krainov model (1, 2); CEO: carrier-envelope-offset phase
; CoM: centre of mass; CTMC: classical trajectory monte carlo simulation; FWHM: full width half maximum; IR: infrared; KR: Keldysh-Rutherford model; NA: non-adiabatic; PMD: photoelectron momentum distribution; PPT: Perelomov, Popov and Terent'ev model (3, 4); SAE: single active electron approximation; SCT: singleclassical trajectory; SFA: strong field approximation; TDSE: time-dependent Schrödinger equation
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