Abstract

We present a time-domain treatment of pump–probe experiments with chirped pulses derived from the same laser source. In this theory we treat the nonlinearities as decaying either instantaneously or exponentially. Therefore the results from it cover different mechanisms originating from electronic orbitals, molecular vibrations, molecular orientations, excited-state populations, etc., as long as their decay falls into one of the two classes. We derive expressions for the transmission of the probe in each case. We divide the transmission expression from nonlinearities with exponential decay into a number of terms, each of which describes a unique situation. These include two-beam coupling in the coherent region that is not present with chirp-free pulses, two-photon absorption, and excited-state absorption. We give analytical expressions for the transmission where possible, and we give the first-order approximation and the estimated error when expression in closed form is unattainable. We discuss various aspects of these terms.

© 1997 Optical Society of America

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