30, 20, and 10 Years Ago in OPN

“The quest for the world’s shortest laser pulse has led to a remarkable pace of development in ultrafast laser technology. Although pulses of only a few cycles duration have been made, clearly the observation of a 0-fs pulse would represent a key result ... In most experiments, a 100-fs pulse is amplified and passed through a nonlinear medium, generally a simple single-mode silica optical fiber. The resulting nonlinear propagation creates a large bandwidth increase, and … significant compression ratios have been obtained.”