Abstract

The high pulse repetition rates (~100 MHz) of radio-frequency free-electron lasers make possible the investigation of molecular response to a rapid pulse train.¹ When the molecular decay time T2 is much larger than the time between pulses T, molecular memory is carried from pulse to pulse. For stimulated Raman scattering (SRS) the memory effect can lead to an increase in the size of the Raman dipole resulting in enhanced scattering. We analyze the 1-D SRS equations in the condition that the scattering under an individual pulse occurs in the transient regime (~10 ps). We obtain a general expression for the behavior of SRS which reduces to the following long-time limits: (1) When T2 ≪ T, the SRS from each pulse in the train develops independently from the others; (2) When T2 ≫ T, the transient SRS response is equivalent to the steady-state response to a constant pump at the time-averaged pump intensity. We also perform this analysis for a medium such as the atmosphere where the density of scatterers and Raman bandwidth decrease exponentially with distance.

© 1987 Optical Society of America