CIPS/OSA Brown Bag Seminar Series

Thursday, November 8, 2007

12 noon , RLE Haus Conf. Room 36-428

"Shaping electric fields on a femtosecond timescale"

Erich Ippen, RLE, MIT

Advances in ultrashort laser pulse generation have made it possible to control not only the intensity of the pulse envelope but also the underlying optical electric field.  This talk will describe how this is accomplished and how this kind of control is resulting in highly accurate optical clocks, ultraprecise spectroscopy, and optical arbitrary waveform generators.

Biography

Erich Ippen is the Elihu Thomson Professor of Electrical Engineering and Professor of Physics at MIT. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  At Bell Labs in the mid 1970s, Erich Ippen and Charles Shank produced the first pulses of light shorter than 1 psec and carried out the first femtosecond experiments in molecules, semiconductors and biological complexes. With his students at MIT since 1980, Ippen has continued to advance femtosecond science and technology, decreasing pulse durations to less than two cycles, studying ultrafast phenomena in materials, and developing compact short-pulse lasers and fiber-optic devices for optical communication and signal processing.