Ultrashort pulse

In optics, an ultrashort pulse of light is an electromagnetic pulse whose time duration is of the order of a picosecond (10⁻¹² second) or less. Such pulses have a broadband optical spectrum, and can be created by mode-locked oscillators. They are commonly referred to as ultrafast events. Amplification of ultrashort pulses almost always requires the technique of chirped pulse amplification, in order to avoid damage to the gain medium of the amplifier.

They are characterized by a high peak intensity (or more correctly, irradiance) that usually leads to nonlinear interactions in various materials, including air. These processes are studied in the field of nonlinear optics.

In the specialized literature, "ultrashort" refers to the femtosecond (fs) and picosecond (ps) range, although such pulses no longer hold the record for the shortest pulses artificially generated. Indeed, x-ray pulses with durations on the attosecond time scale have been reported.

The 1999 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Ahmed H. Zewail for using ultrashort pulses to observe chemical reactions on the timescales they occur on, opening up the field of .

There is no standard definition of ultrashort pulse. Usually the attribute 'ultrashort' applies to pulses with a temporal duration of a few tens of femtoseconds, but in a larger sense any pulse which lasts less than a few picoseconds can be considered ultrafast.

A common example is a chirped Gaussian pulse, a wave whose field amplitude follows a Gaussian envelope and whose instantaneous phase has a frequency sweep.

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