Shaping of Ultrashort Light Pulses

For many applications a specific time profile of short laser pulses is desired. One example is the coherent control of chemical reactions (see Sect. 15.2) Recently, some techniques have been developed that allow such pulse shaping and that work as follows  

This results in a light pulse with a time profile that depends on the phase differences between its spectral components, which in turn can be controlled by the LCD, driven by a special computer program (Fig. 11.34) [11.81,11.82]. A self-learning algorithm can be incorporated into the closed loop, which compares the output pulse form with the wanted one and tries to vary the voltage at the different pixels in such a way that the wanted pulse form is approximated [11.83]. More details can be found in [11.84] 

---