Advances in femtosecond laser technology have become widely adopted in a nonlinear laser spectroscopy and photochemistry. With the extreme temporal and spatial confinements it becomes possible to induce nonlinear responses of the material and to study them with high temporal resolution. The complexity of the medium response to the excitation field necessitates control the excitation process in order to figure out its origin, for example, inter-or intra-molecular dynamics. Therefore, over the last two decades, femtosecond pulse-shaping methods have been developed to reach an unprecedented level of control over the ultrafast laser waveforms where spectral amplitude and phase can be specified in accordance to expected response. The characterization and tailoring of femtosecond pulses was central for my research projects.
In this talk I will present the experimental results in generation of flat top temporal shape pulses with sharp on and off fronts and no loss of spectral bandwidth for particular spectroscopic applications; characterization of noisy ultrafast laser sources, namely, pulse-to-pulse stability, caused by spectral phase or amplitude noise; and development of a non-contact no-reagents system operating in the eye-safe wavelength range for standoff trace detection of explosives and high-speed imaging, 0.06 ms per pixel
