The stabilization of the carrier-envelope phase of ultrashort laser pulses went through a rapid development from the first publication of a feasible concept in 1999 to being a mature tool for frequency metrology and attosecond science now. Using this technique, stabilization of the timing between the carrier wave and the envelope of a laser pulse with residual jitters of only 100 attoseconds has become possible. Naturally, the questions arises whether and how this can be further improved. The current work is devoted to determining the physical mechanisms which generate jitter in carrier-envelope phase stabilization. Furthermore, it is investigated whether there is a fundamental limitation to the achievable accuracy. To this end, two methods for removal of technical noise contributions are initially discussed. Different interferometer topologies are investigated and spurious interferometer noise is reduced by more than 40% using a commonpath layout. A novel two-detector based carrier-envelope phase retrieval technique for amplified laser pulses is demonstrated enabling the circumvention of the shot-noise constraint of the conventional extraction method to the maximum extent possible. Next, a novel feed-forward stabilization concept is developed that enables carrier-envelope phase stabilizations with only 20 attosecond residual timing jitter between carrier and envelope of the laser pulse. This feed-forward method is unconditionally stable against drop-out and permits the generation of a train of pulses with identical electric field structure with no additional measures. As the feed-forward concept widely avoids the technical noise sources of the conventional feedback stabilization, the resulting noise spectra exhibit only two unavoidable residual noise mechanisms: a highfrequency white noise floor stemming from shot noise in the carrier-envelope phase detection and a drift-like contribution with 1/f noise characteristics. Finally, the drift-like residual noise mechan

Ultrashort Laser Pulse Phenomena, Second Edition serves as an introduction to the phenomena of ultra short laser pulses and describes how this technology can be used to examine problems in areas such as electromagnetism, optics, and quantum mechanics. Ultrashort Laser Pulse Phenomena combines theoretical backgrounds and experimental techniques and will serve as a manual on designing and constructing femtosecond ("faster than electronics") systems or experiments from scratch. Beyond the simple optical system, the various sources of ultrashort pulses are presented, again with emphasis on the basic concepts and how they apply to the design of particular sources (dye lasers, solid state lasers, semiconductor lasers, fiber lasers, and sources based on frequency conversion). Provides an easy to follow guide through "faster than electronics" probing and detection methods THE manual on designing and constructing femtosecond systems and experiments Discusses essential technology for applications in micro-machining, femtochemistry, and medical imaging

The PUILS series delivers up-to-date reviews of progress in Ultrafast Intense Laser Science, a newly emerging interdisciplinary research field spanning atomic and molecular physics, molecular science, and optical science, which has been stimulated by the recent developments in ultrafast laser technologies. Each volume compiles peer-reviewed articles authored by researchers at the forefront of each their own subfields of UILS. Every chapter opens with an overview of the topics to be discussed, so that researchers unfamiliar to the subfield, as well as graduate students, can grasp the importance and attractions of the research topic at hand; these are followed by reports of cutting-edge discoveries. This ninth volume covers a broad range of topics from this interdisciplinary research field, focusing on ultrafast molecular responses to an intense laser field, advanced techniques for attosecond pulse generation, atomic and molecular responses to attosecond pulses, photoelectron spectroscopy of atoms and molecules interacting with intense light fields, and attosecond pulse interaction with solid materials.

Because of the favorable characteristics of solid-state lasers, they have become the preferred candidates for a wide range of applications in science and technology, including spectroscopy, atmospheric monitoring, micromachining, and precision metrology. Presenting the most recent developments in the field, Solid-State Lasers and Applications focuses on the design and applications of solid-state laser systems. With contributions from leading international experts, the book explores the latest research results and applications of solid-state lasers as well as various laser systems. The beginning chapters discuss current developments and applications of new solid-state gain media in different wavelength regions, including cerium-doped lasers in the ultraviolet range, ytterbium lasers near 1μm, rare-earth ion-doped lasers in the eye-safe region, and tunable Cr2+:ZnSe lasers in the mid-infrared range. The remaining chapters study specific modes of operation of solid-state laser systems, such as pulsed microchip lasers, high-power neodymium lasers, ultrafast solid-state lasers, amplification of femtosecond pulses with optical parametric amplifiers, and noise characteristics of solid-state lasers. Solid-State Lasers and Applications covers the most important aspects of the field to provide current, comprehensive coverage of solid-state lasers.

I: Coherent Control.- The Odyssey of Kent Wilson: Holding Molecules in the Light.- The Kent Wilson Group in the 1990s.- Algorithms for Closed Loop Ultrafast Control of Quantum Dynamics.- Control of Quantum Dynamics by Adaptive Femtosecond Pulse Shaping.- Optimal Control of Two-Photon Transitions: Bright and Dark Femtosecond Pulses Designed by a Self-Learning Algorithm.- Feedback Optimization of Molecular States Using a Parametrization in Frequency and Time Domain.- Controlling and Probing Impulsively Induced Ground State Vibrational Dynamics.- Dynamics and Coherent Control of Condensed Phase Vibrational Coherences.- Spatiotemporal Coherent Control.- Coherent Control and Nonlinear Interactions of Semiconductor Cavity Polaritons.- Coherent Control of XUV Radiation.- Enhancement of k? Yield from Femtosecond Laser Produced Plasmas by Automated Control of Plasma Parameters.- II: Lasers for Ultrashort Pulses.- Challenges and Limitations on Generating Few Cycle Laser Pulses Directly from Oscillators.- Extremely Flexible and Accurate Chirp-Compensation for 75-MHz Repetitive Glass-Fiber Output of a More-Than 100-THz Bandwidth: Generation of a-Few4Optical-Cycle Transform-Limited Pulses.- 14-fs Pulses at 1.3- m Generated from an All-Solid-State Cr: Forsterite Laser.- Smooth Dispersion Compensation: Novel Chirped Mirrors with Suppressed Dispersion Oscillations.- Dispersion Management over one Octave with Tilted-Front-Interface Chirped Mirrors.- A Prism-Pair-Formed Pulse Shaper Compresses Optical Pulses to the 6 fs Regime.- Correcting the Failure of the Slowly Varying Amplitude Approximation for Short Pulses.- Precise Control of the Pulse-to-Pulse Carrier-Envelope Phase in a Mode-Locked Laser.- Carrier Envelope Offset Phase Stabilization for Few-Cycle Nonlinear Optics.- Sub-10 fs Light Pulses with Stabilized Carrier-Envelope Phase: Optical Waveform Synthesis.- Frequency Domain Control of Femtosecond Pulse Trains with Fabry-Perot Reference Cavities for Optical Frequency Metrology.- Nonlinear Optcal Method for Determining the Absolute Carrier Phase of a Laser Pulse.- Generation of Relativistic Intensity Pulses at 300 Hz Repetition Rate.- Reflection Double Pass Ti: Sapphire Continuous-Wave Amplifier Delivering 5.77 W Average Power, 82 MHz Repetition Rate, 100 fs Pulse.- Chirped Pulse Amplification for Ultraviolet Femtosecond Pulses Using Ce: LiCAF Crystal.- Parabolic Pulses from Yb: Fiber Amplifiers: A New Paradigm for High Power Ultrashort Pulse Generation.- Generation, Amplification and Characterization of Tunable Visible Ultrashort Shaped Pulses.- Synthesis of Supershort UV Pulses Using Phase-Locked Raman Side-Band Generation.- Generation and Measurement of Ultrafast Tunable VUV Light.- III: Pulse Characterization, Shaping and Measurement Techniques.- Autocorrelation Measurement of Femtosecond Optical Pulses Using Two-Photon-Induced Photocurrent in a Photomultiplier Tube.- Precision and Accuracy of Ultrashort Optical Pulse Measurement Using SPIDER.- Highly Simplified Ultrashort Pulse Measurement.- Time-Gated FROG: A New Technique for Studying the Build-Up of Optical Pulse Field in Mode-Locked Ultrafast Lasers.- Measuring the Intensity and Phase of Ultrabroadband Continuum.- Amplitude and Phase Measurement of Mid-IR Femtosecond Pulses Using XFROG.- Rapid Retrieval of Ultrashort Pulse Amplitude and Phase from a Sonogram Trace.- Simultaneous Two-Dimensional Space and Time Measurement of Ultrashort Optical Pulses Based on Spatial Spectral Interferometry.- Reliability of Fourier-Transform Spectral Interferometry.- Direct Measurement of Spectral Phase of Femtosecond Pulses Using Optical Parametric Effect.- Ultrashort Pulse Characterization by Frequency Resolved Pump Probe.- Attosecond Cross Correlation Technique.- Unbalanced Multiphoton Autocorrelation Techniques for fs Pulse Measurements in the Near IR.- Unbalanced Third-Order Correlations for Characterizing the Intensity and Phase of Femtosecond Pulses.- Spectral Phase Correlator for Coded Wavefo