Optical power limiting of ultrashort hyper-Gaussian pulses in cascade three-level system

Propagation of strong femtosecond hyper-Gaussian pulses in a cascade three-level molecular system is studied by solving numerically the Maxwell-Bloch equations by the iterative predictor-corrector finite-difference time-domain method. Optical power limiting behavior induced by strong nonlinear two-photon absorption is observed for different orders of the femtosecond hyper-Gaussian pulses. Pulses of a higher order temporal profile are found to have a wider power range of optical limiting but a larger output saturation intensity. Both the output saturation value and the damage threshold of optical power limiting decrease with pulse duration increasing. The decrease of the pulse area along the pulse propagation is much slower than that obtained from the two-photon area theorem due to invalidity of the slowly varying amplitude approximation and the monochromatic field hypothesis.