English

Considerations regarding one-photon phase control

Chemical Physics 2019-10-31 v1 Optics

Abstract

The dynamics of a system interacting with an ultrashort pulse is known to depend on the phase content of said pulse. For linear absorption, phase control is possible over time-varying quantities, such as the population of metastable states, but not over time-independent quantities, such as the population of steady states. We derive here a strict upper bound for phase control that interpolates between these two cases --- the bound quantifies the approach to the steady state and resulting loss of one-photon phase control based on physical timescales. Significantly, this bound is violated by a number of numerical and experimental investigations. A careful analysis of the physical conditions underlying this result exposes multiphoton effects as a mechanism for these experiments.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1910.13878,
  title  = {Considerations regarding one-photon phase control},
  author = {Cyrille Lavigne and Paul Brumer},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1910.13878},
  year   = {2019}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-23T11:59:33.898Z