Photon echo optical pulse compression

Abstract
It is predicted that linearly chirped optical excitation pulses give rise to photon echoes whose shortness is limited only by the total material bandwidth that contributes to the echo signal. The photon echo process acts as a frequency-dependent optical delay line whose dispersion is determined by the chirp rate of the excitation pulses rather than by their bandwidth. Consequently, long and short pulses can be compressed with equal facility without complicated alignment procedure. Accumulated echoes have similar properties and can be used with trains of weak excitation pulses.