Nonlinear Shaping in the Picosecond Gap

Lightwave pulse shaping in the picosecond regime has remained unaddressed because it resides beyond the limits of state-of-the-art techniques, either due to its inherently narrow spectral content or fundamental speed limitations in electronic devices. The so-called picosecond shaping gap hampers progress in all areas correlated with time-modulated light-matter interactions, such as photoelectronics, health and medical technologies, and energy and material sciences. We report on a novel nonlinear method to simultaneously frequency-convert and adaptably shape the envelope of light wavepackets in the picosecond regime by balancing spectral engineering and nonlinear conversion in solid-state nonlinear media, without requiring active devices. We capture computationally the versatility of this methodology across a diverse set of nonlinear conversion chains and initial conditions. We also provide experimental evidence of this framework producing picosecond-shaped, ultra-narrowband, near-transform limited light pulses from broadband, femtosecond input pulses, paving the way toward programmable lightwave shaping at GHz-to-THz frequencies.