Ultrafast Photonics - Proceedings of the Fifty-Sixth Scottish Universities Summer School in Physics St Andrews, September 2002 (Electronic book text)

Ultrafast photonics has become an interdisciplinary topic of high international research interest because of the spectacular development of compact and efficient lasers producing optical pulses with durations in the femtosecond time domain. Present day long-haul telecommunications systems are almost entirely based on the transmission of short burst