Compression of light pulses in photonic crystals

A study is made of the feasibility of controlling the phase and duration of short laser pulses with the aid of dispersive properties of photonic crystals. Pulse compression and phase modulation in one-dimensional structures with photonic band gaps are investigated analytically and numerically. It is shown that photonic crystals with a cubic optical nonlinearity can be used to reduce the duration of laser pulses, right down to several periods of an optical field, in structures with spatial dimensions typically less than a millimetre. The physical factors which limit the minimum duration of light pulses compressed in such photonic crystal structures are identified.