Efim A. Khazanov is a physicist-experimenter specializing in the field of laser physics and nonlinear optics. His main scientific results concern solid-state lasers with record high peak power as well as laser with high average power.

    E.A. Khazanov is author of a number of key ideas underlying the creation of a compact petawatt femtosecond laser based on an optical parametric amplifier created at IAP RAS. The electron and proton laser-plasma acceleration as well as laboratory astrophysics experiments were demonstrated with this laser. Khazanov proposed and implemented in experiment nonlinear-optical methods for controlling the parameters of ultrahigh power lasers, including several-fold increase in the radiation power due to nonlinear pulse compression.

    Efim Khazanov is founder of a new scientific direction – the thermo-optics of magnetically active media. He obtained pioneering results and created magneto-active devices that work at average laser radiation power almost three orders of magnitude higher than before. Currently, these devices are successfully used in many laboratories around the world, including the LIGO and VIRGO laser gravitational wave detectors.

    The pulse duration at the output of femtosecond lasers is usually close to the Fourier limit, and can be shortened by increasing the spectral width. To this end, use is made of self-phase modulation when a pulse propagates in a medium with cubic nonlinearity. Then, the pulse with a chirp (frequency dependence of the spectrum phase) is compressed due to a linear dispersion element, which introduces a chirp of the same modulus, but oppo-site in sign. This pulse post-compression, known since the 1960s, has been widely used and is being developed up to the present for pulses with energies from fractions of a nJ to tens of J. The review is devoted to the theoretical foundations of this method, problems of energy scaling, and a discussion of the results of more than 150 experimental studies.