Non-resonant picosecond three-wave mixing in the gas phase.

Autor: LaCombe G, Wang J, Rouxel JR, Simeni Simeni M
Jazyk: angličtina
Zdroj: Optics letters [Opt Lett] 2024 Dec 01; Vol. 49 (23), pp. 6717-6720.
DOI: 10.1364/OL.542597
Abstrakt: We report on the experimental observation of non-resonant, second-order optical sum-frequency generation (SFG) in five different atomic and molecular gases. The measured signal is attributed to a SFG process by characterizing its intensity scaling and its polarization behavior. We show that the electric quadrupole mechanism cannot explain the observed trends and suggest a mechanism based on symmetry breaking along the incident beam path arising from laser-induced species ground state number density gradients. Our results demonstrate that the SFG is about four orders of magnitude stronger than the third-harmonic generation (THG) and independent from any externally applied electric fields. These features make this method suitable for gas number density measurements at the picosecond time scale in reactive flows and plasmas.
Databáze: MEDLINE