Ultrashort pulse

In optics, an ultrashort pulse, also known as an ultrafast event, is an electromagnetic pulse whose time duration is of the order of a picosecond (10⁻¹² second) or less. Such pulses have a broadband optical spectrum, and can be created by mode-locked oscillators. Amplification of ultrashort pulses almost always requires the technique of chirped pulse amplification, in order to avoid damage to the gain medium of the amplifier.

They are characterized by a high peak intensity (or more correctly, irradiance) that usually leads to nonlinear interactions in various materials, including air. These processes are studied in the field of nonlinear optics.

In the specialized literature, "ultrashort" refers to the femtosecond (fs) and picosecond (ps) range, although such pulses no longer hold the record for the shortest pulses artificially generated. Indeed, x-ray pulses with durations on the attosecond time scale have been reported.

The 1999 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to Ahmed H. Zewail, for the use of ultrashort pulses to observe chemical reactions at the timescales on which they occur,^[1] opening up the field of femtochemistry. A further Nobel prize, the 2023 Nobel Prize in Physics, was also awarded for ultrashort pulses. This prize was awarded to Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz, and Anne L'Huillier for the development of attosecond pulses and their ability to probe electron dynamics.^[2]