Ultrafast quantum optics

Ultrashort light pulses play an important role in the generation, manipulation and characterization of nonclassical light. Nonclassical light is often generated from a classical pump beam using a nonlinear optical process. One might expect that the high peak intensity of ultrashort pulses would provide the necessary driver for such processes, and this is indeed the case. Ultrashort pulses have been used to generate squeezed states, and quadrature entangled states via three and four wave mixing, photon number states, polarization and frequency or directional entangled photon pairs states via three wave mixing.