Optical processing of picosecond laser pulses

Abstract

Short laser pulses carry temporally and spatially coherent radiation which generally exhibits a broad spectrum of monochromatic plane waves. Pulses with narrow temporal frequency spectrum may be involved in operations of spatially coherent optics. On the contrary, pulses with narrow spatial frequency spectrum are suitable to experiments of temporally coherent optics: temporal diffraction, interference, filtering and frequency modulation, etc.