Abstract

Propagation of an intense ultrashort laser pulse in a nonlinear medium leads to a huge spectral broadening of the pulse. This phenomenon has attracted a great deal of attention in the past decade but has not yet received a satisfactory explanation. Two mechanisms, self-phase modulation¹ and parametric four-wave mixing,² have been proposed as being responsible for the spectral broadening. Neither, however, can explain fully the experimental observation.

© 1984 Optical Society of America