Spatio-temporal-polarization control of ultrafast laser interactions

随着我们制造的结构和设备变得越来越小，纳米科学和纳米技术正在随着新的物理定律而发展。量子级效应以新的方式表现出来，以令人惊讶但极其有用的方式操纵材料的电、磁、光、机械几乎所有特性。光学物理和量子光学体现了这些趋势，在近场、共聚焦、等离子体电子和多光子显微镜领域，将分辨率推至远低于经典衍射极限的水平，并因超分辨率光学显微镜获得2014年诺贝尔化学奖。这些工具打开了纳米科学的前沿，使纳米结构的形成、分析和操作能够达到单分子的大小，而激光投影光刻已经定义了纳米技术的前沿，用于大批量制造晶体管栅极宽度为10纳米的微电子芯片，只有几个原子厚（TSMC, 2017）。在这场缩小世界的竞赛中，我们的项目正在寻求理解和利用在比光波长小得多的纳米结构中发现的新的光学现象。从线性光学领域开始，具有不寻常光子带隙、超材料或等离子体电子特性的新型光学材料已经被开发出来，它们重塑了光如何传播或达到传统衍射极限，并具有强大的光学分辨率。能够以极短持续时间脉冲提供高功率的商用激光系统的出现，加快了非线性光相互作用物理学的研究步伐，并支持了最近主流工业飞秒激光微加工应用的出现。如此高亮度的光在大块透明和纳米结构介质中传播时提出了重大问题。短光脉冲受介质非线性响应的自我操纵，同时在纳米结构介质附近接收共振反馈。这种非线性相互作用为控制相位和吸收响应定义了一个新的未开发的机会，我们的目标是研究和控制基于我们先进的短脉冲激光器的新的时空偏振工具。***我们的计划提出了各种振幅，相位和偏振移动模式，以创建新颖的光束形状和模式-非衍射（贝塞尔），涡旋，自加速”，并利用先进的实时表征工具，使非线性吸收，克尔效应，等离子体响应，相位爆炸和冲击物理可以在透明介质中被跟踪，并最终被控制，以驱动光子学，生物学和医疗设备的新制造方法。

Nanoscience and nanotechnology are evolving with the new physical laws encountered as the structures and devices we make become smaller. Quantum-level effects manifest in new ways to manipulate electrical, magnetic, optical, mechanical virtually all properties of materials in surprising but exceedingly useful ways. Optical physics and quantum optics have embodied these trends to push resolving power well below the classical diffraction limit in areas of near-field, confocal, plasmatronic and multi-photon microscopy, prodding an Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2014 for super-resolution optical microscopy. Such tools are opening the frontiers of nanoscience by enabling the formation, interrogation and manipulation of nanostructures down to the size of single molecules while laser projection lithography has come to define the nanotechnology forefront for high-volume manufacturing of microelectronic chips with transistor gate widths of 10 nm just a few atoms thick (TSMC, 2017).***In this race to shrink the world, our program is seeking to understand and harness the new optical phenomena found in nanostructures much smaller than the wavelength of light. Beginning in the domain of linear optics, novel types of optical materials with unusual photonic bandgap, metamaterial, or plasmatronic properties have been developed that reshape how light can propagate or reach below conventional diffraction limits with powerfully enhanced optical resolution. The advent of commercial laser systems that can deliver high power in extremely short duration pulses has accelerated the pace of studies in nonlinear optical interaction physics and underpinned the recent emergence of mainstream industrial femtosecond laser micromachining applications. Such high brightness light poses significant questions when propagating inside bulk transparent and nanostructured media. The short light pulse is self' manipulated by the nonlinear response of the medium, while also receiving resonance feedback in the proximity of nanostructured media. Such nonlinear interactions define a new unexplored opportunity for manipulating the phase and absorption response that we aim to study and control with new spatio-temporal-polarization tools based on our advanced short-pulsed lasers.***Our program proposes various modes of amplitude, phase and polarization shifting to create novel beam shapes and patterns - non-diffracting (Bessel), vortex, self-accelerating' and harness advanced real-time characterization tools such that the nonlinear absorption, Kerr-effect, plasma response, phase explosion and shock physics can be followed in transparent media and eventually be controlled to drive open new manufacturing methods for photonics, biology and medical devices.