Engineering Commons^™

Few-Cycle Pulses In Two-Level Media, Lee W. Casperson

Electrical and Computer Engineering Faculty Publications and Presentations

Techniques for producing, measuring, and applying ever shorter electromagnetic pulses are being developed for incorporation in a variety of modern high-speed systems. In many cases these pulses are at most a few cycles in length, and so-called half-cycle electromagnetic pulses are also widely employed. The interaction of such pulses with two-level media is considered here in detail, and these media are basic to many of the absorbing and amplifying configurations of optics and laser studies. Significant delays and distortion of the resulting polarization and population pulses can occur, and nonlinear optical effects are also revealed. The limitations of the parity, …