Abstract

Ultrashort pulse laser technology has recently experienced significant advances, producing high peak power pulses of optical radiation few femtoseconds in duration, corresponding to only few cycles of its fundamental frequency. The future progress of this area is inevitable due to the unique properties of ultrashort laser pulses that are crucial for various science and engineering application areas including optical communications, storage, medical and biomedical imaging, chemistry and physics. A common feature of these applications relies on our ability to control the shape of the ultrashort pulses, store and retrieve them as well as, conversely, our ability to detect the shape of the ultrashort pulses. In this paper we discuss examples on utilizing ultra-fast space-time processing for implementing data formats suitable for storage, access, processing, and transmission of information over an optical fiber.

© 1997 Optical Society of America