Masters Thesis Defense - Propagation of Femtosecond Optical Vortices in beta Barium Borate

Who: Nicolas Cusnir

Time: 11:15am, Monday, 6th May, 2007

Place: P-250

Abstract: The study of optical vortices has been the center of a growing amount of research attention. Over the past decade such vortices have found various applications such as optical tweezers and the guiding of cold atoms. Recently there has been growing interest in generating optical vortices in femtosecond laser fields as tool to studying intense-field ionization processes.

In this paper we propose to study the propagation of femtosecond optical vortices in beta barium borate. Specifically we observe the second harmonic generation of optical vortices in this material. We have modeled the nonlinear process in MATLAB and compare theoretical results to experiment.

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