Ultrashort Pulsed Light Sources Based On Parametric Processes in Optical Fibers

This presentation is about generating short pulses using optical fiber based light sources. Pulses of light, like those from the flash of your camera, serve to illuminate and record rapid processes. The electronic flashtube in a standard camera generates a single pulse about 1 millisecond in duration. Modern laser technology allows us to generate pulses as short in duration as a few femtoseconds. I will give brief tutorials on ultrashort light pulses and nonlinear fiber optics, and then share a few of the results of ongoing research into this field at the University of California – Merced.