Abstract
Polarization shaping of terahertz pulses enables us to manipulate the temporal evolution of the amplitude and direction of electric-field vectors in a prescribed manner. Such arbitrary control of terahertz waves has great potential in expanding the scope of terahertz spectroscopy, the manipulation of terahertz nonlinear phenomena and coherent control. This is analogous to the use of pulse-shaping techniques for optical frequencies that involve light's polarization states as a controllable degree of freedom. Here, we propose and demonstrate a method for generating a prescribed terahertz polarization-shaped waveform by the optical rectification of a laser pulse whose instantaneous polarization state and intensity are controlled by an optical pulse shaper. We have developed a deterministic procedure to derive input parameters for the pulse shaper that are adequate to generate the desired terahertz polarization-shaped waveform, with the benefit of simple polarization selection rules for the rectification process of light waves propagating along the three-fold axis of a nonlinear optical crystal.
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Acknowledgements
This study was supported in part by a Grant-in-Aid for Scientific Research (KAKENHI) in innovative area ‘Optical Science of Dynamically Correlated Electrons (DYCE, no. 2003)’ (20104002) and in priority area ‘Strong Photon–Molecule Coupling Fields (no. 470)’ (21020011) of the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of Japan (MEXT), by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) through its Funding Program for World-Leading Innovative R&D on Science and Technology (FIRST), the Photon Frontier Network Program (MEXT), and by the Special Coordination Funds for Promoting Science and Technology (MEXT). M.S., T.H. and N.K. acknowledge support from JSPS Research Fellowships. The authors thank Y. Svirko for his critical reading and suggestions about the manuscript, and thank the reviewers for providing comments that helped in improving the discussion.
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M.S. and T.H. contributed equally to the work. All authors contributed to the design, data analysis and preparation of the manuscript. M.S. and N.K. performed all experiments at the University of Tokyo. M.S. and K.M. designed and developed the optical polarization shaper. T.H. and M.K-G. provided the theory for designing pulse shapes and terahertz generation. K.K. and T.S. gave technical support. K.Y. and M.K-G. provided experimental support. K.M. and M.K-G. planned and supervised the project.
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Sato, M., Higuchi, T., Kanda, N. et al. Terahertz polarization pulse shaping with arbitrary field control. Nature Photon 7, 724–731 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2013.213
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2013.213
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