Linear and Nonlinear Optical Methods for Recording the States and Laser-Induced Phase Transitions on the Surface of Condensed Media

Abstract

As has already been noted in the Introduction, the most dramatic result of laser technological advances in the last several years is the development and applica­tion of lasers emitting ultrashort pulses of femtosecond duration [13–15, 72–75] . Of course, we cannot give an exhaustive review of the application of ultrashort laser pulses to the study of all types of the fast photoprocesses in solids (there already exist a good review of the early works on this subject [30] , collective monographs [74, 76] and proceedings of international conferences on ultrafast phenomena [14, 75, 77–80] ). Nevertheless, in this section we will give a brief description of recent studies aimed at the application of pulsed laser techniques for diagnostics of fast processes on the surfaces of solids (Sec. 2.1); we will study in greater detail the nonlinear optical aspect of these studies in Sec. 2.2, 2.3.