Abstract

The polarization pulse shaping, that is, the manipulation of the direction and timing of electromagnetic fields, has played a pivotal role in handling the interactions between strong pulsed light fields and matter, such as in increasing multiphoton ionization yield , optical gating for higher harmonic generation, and photoassisted asymmetric synthesis of chiral molecules. Recent advances in terahertz technologies have extended the scope of these studies to terahertz frequency ranges. The shaping of the temporal trajectories of terahertz vector fields could substantially increase the degree of freedom of such nonlinear interactions. However, to date, the methods for terahertz polarization pulse shaping have been limited to combining terahertz waves generated by multiple laser pulses, and their flexibility is far behind the Fourier-synthesis based shaping techniques available for optical frequencies which can actively control numerous parameters necessary to generate tailored pulses.

© 2013 IEEE