Overview

The first Optical Society of America (OSA) Topical Meeting on Picosec­ ond Phenomena, held at Hilton Head, South Carolina, in 1978, brought together in a congenial setting an interdisciplinary group of laser engineers and physicists who were exploring the emerging technologies for generat­ ing and applying picosecond optical pulses, together with scientists from the fields of chemistry, physics, biology, and electronics who saw in those pulses capabilities for studying atomic and molecular phenomena on time scales previously unrealizable. The technology in this field has since developed even more rapidly and remarkably than foreseen eight years ago, and the applications to science and technology, in physics, chemistry, biology, electronics, and commu­ nications, have proven to be equally extraordinary. Optical pulses with pulse widths shorter than 10 femtosecond - only a few optical cycles in du­ ration - along with mono cycle infrared pulses, complex nonlinear optical solitons, electrooptic techniques with subpicosecond time resolutions, and a full toolkit of measurement and detection techniques have now emerged, including new methods for making ultrafast measurements in some cases even without ultrafast optical pulses. These tools are now being widely applied to study the internal motions of complex molecules and atomic lat­ tices, the relaxation times of superheated electrons in solids, the ultrafast dynamics of chemical reactions, the excited-state lifetimes of photosyn­ thetic and visual pigments, and the response times of the fastest electronic circuits yet developed.

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