Abstract

We demonstrate amplified all-optical switching of ultrashort laser pulses using two different types of cascaded second-order nonlinear optical processes simultaneously in a polarization-gate geometry. The first process rotates the input-pulse polarization, thus achieving optical gating. At high intensities, this signal pulse is then amplified by a different process involving parametric amplification, yielding switching efficiencies up to 320% and an on-off ratio of 6×10⁵ with 250-fs pulses.

© 1997 Optical Society of America