SLO/ELNO Experimental Laser and Nonlinear Optics

Lecturer: Ondřej Haderka
Lecture: 2 hours/week + exercise 1 hour/week
Credits: 3
Winter semester
Form of course completion: colloquium

• Laser – principle of operation, regimes of generation, possibilities of pumping, the most used types of active media, nonlinear optics - phenomena of the second and the third order
• Laser in continuous regime, modes and their relationship with the resonator, homogenous and inhomogeneous expansion, hole-burning, stability of the laser, multi-line, single-line and single-frequency operation of the laser, two-, three- and four-leveled model of the laser, description by means of speed equations, typical lasers
• Laser in the regime of Q-switching, active and passive Q-switching, cavity dumping, laboratory demonstration, laser in the regime of synchronization of modes, active and passive modelocking, advanced methods of synchronization of modes, generation of ultrashort pulses, influence of dispersion on propagation of ultrashort pulses, Ti/sapphire amplifier, generation of white continuum
• Nonlinear optics, susceptibility of the second and the third order, nonlinear optical crystals, phase synchronization, calculations of the orientation of the crystal for the interaction of type I and type II, optical and mechanical properties, generation of the second harmonics, extracavity and intracavity double lasers, compact systems (double DPSS lasers), optical parametric amplifier, laboratory demonstrations, measurement of ultrashort pulses, autocorrelation techniques, full characterization of the pulses, compression of ultrashort impulses
• Generation of correlated photon pairs of type I and type II, properties of correlated pairs, SPCM and iCCD cameras, coincidence detection, statistics of number of photons, Hong-Ou-Mendel interferometer