Investigation of Dispersion Effects on Ultrashort Pulses

In modern optical systems ultrafast phenomena are often applied in a wide variety of applications. Due to the large spectral bandwidth of such short pulses, dispersion effects play a major role in the design and analysis of those systems. Hence, to ensure an accurate and suitable modeling, all dispersion effects in the system have to be considered, adequately. In order to emphasize the capabilities of the fast physical optics software VirtualLab Fusion in this particular field of optics, we demonstrate two examples: In the first one, we investigate the behavior of a pulse while propagating through different materials, and illustrate the corresponding dispersion-related effects. We also use this example to demonstrate the capabilities of VirtualLab Fusion’s Pulse Evaluation detector. In the second example, we investigate dispersion effects occurring by reflection at dielectric- or metallic-coated mirrors.