Extreme electrodynamics in time-varying media

Abrupt time variations of the properties of optical materials have been at the center of intense research efforts in recent years, with the prospect of enabling extreme wave transformations and of leveraging time as a degree of freedom for wave control. While the most viable approach to yield ultrafast variations of the optical material response is through optical pumping of nonlinear media, the complex dynamics in these systems are not yet fully understood. Here, as a relevant case study of recent experimental observations, we rigorously investigate the pump-probe dynamics in a 310-nm-thick transparent conductive oxide etalon, using a weak 40-fs probe and a pump that displays peak power densities in the TW/cm2 range with a duration of a few femtoseconds. We examine the pump-probe interaction using a hydrodynamic Maxwell approach that accounts for diffraction, self-focusing and self-defocusing, self- and cross-phase modulation, probe gain, and linear and nonlinear material dispersion expanded in the perturbative regime up to ninth order for both pump and probe. By allowing the intricacies of the pump-probe interaction to proceed in time, we can also define an effective spatiotemporal permittivity for a more direct evaluation of the material ultrabroadband optical behavior. The reported results challenge the conventional modeling of this kind of problem, which has so far overlooked pump dynamics, simplistically assigning a local time-dependent refractive index to the probe that may be designed to fit the experimental data but has no physical connection to the complex pump-probe interaction. Our approach unveils new dynamics, pointing toward the possibility to achieve extreme pulse compression into the attosecond range and nonlinear diffraction over deeply subwavelength propagation distances, thus opening a possible new path toward novel and cost-effective tools for integrated photonics and attosecond science. Published by the American Physical Society 2025