Paper 3.7: N. Bloembergen, R.L. Carman, M.E. Mack and F. Shimizu, “Forward picosecond stokes pulse generation in transient stimulated raman scattering,” Phys. Rev. Lett. 23, 1327–1330, 1969.
Reprinted with permission of the American Physical Society.
In the late sixties I served on a laser advisory committee for the United Aircraft Research Laboratories which had a very active research program on lasers at that time. I paid regular visits to East Hartford and became very well acquainted with Dr. A.J. DeMaria and many other scientists there. Tony DeMaria had pioneered the generation of picosecond pulses with mode-locked Nd-glass lasers. I wanted to get a picosecond laser facility at Harvard. A graduate student, R.L. Carman, enjoyed building a large installation which was more elaborate than our customary small-scale experiments. Fujio Shimizu had joined us for additional postdoctoral experience after having spent a couple of years with Boris Stoicheff at the University of Toronto. His quiet demeanor failed to hide his great competence in both theoretical and experimental physics. He later became a professor of physics at the University of Tokyo where I visited his laboratory several times. My last visit occurred in 1992. Dr. M.E. Mack was a very active and enthusiastic researcher who helped to transfer this technology from industry to the university.
The first problem we addressed with our picosecond laser was that of transient stimulated raman scattering. Our early results in liquids are reported here. A little later, additional results obtained in gases were reported in another short communication, “Transient stimulated rotation and vibration raman scattering in gases” (M.E. Mack, R.L. Carman, J. Reintjes and N. Bloembergen, App. Phys. Lett. 16, 209–211, 1970). At the same time, we had started a thorough theoretical study of the transient scattering problem. I had attracted Chen-sow Wang as a postdoctoral fellow. He had already studied these problems as a Ph.D. candidate with Professor Keith Bruekner at the University of California in La Jolla. The theoretical results are published in “Theory of stokes pulse shapes in transient stimulated raman scattering,” R.L. Carman, F. Shimizu, C.S. Wang and N. Bloembergen, Phys. Rev. 2A, 60–72, 1970.
