Abstract

The discovery that combinations of optical fields could exhibit polarity opens up new possibilities for optical handling of molecules [1], A standard situation in which an optical field exhibits polarity is the coherent superposition of a field E_ω at a fundamental frequency _ω with its harmonic E_2ω at frequency 2ω. It is pictured in Figure 1. Polarity of the cubic interferences appears in the non-zero average cube <E³>_t where the subscript t holds for time average.

© 1995 Optical Society of America