Abstract

Control over molecular vibrations requires engineering of a broadband field in amplitude and phase in the mid-infrared domain.¹ Pioneer experiments of Auston and coworkers² put to good use the command of optical pulses to generate far-infrared tunable narrowband radiation in nonlinear crystals. In these experiments, a quasi-periodic sequence of short pulses of tunable period T, related to the mid-infrared emitted frequency 1/T, was formed by means of the beating between two identical linearly chirped pulses. More recently shaping experiments in the mid- infrared domain have been reported,³ where the emitted field is fully characterized by electro-optic sampling.

© 2001 Optical Society of America