Obtaining unipolar half-cycle optical pulses of femto- and attosecond duration with a large electrical area is an urgent but difficult task. The reason for the emerging difficulties lies in the existence of the rule of conservation of the electrical area of the pulse, which does not allow converting a bipolar pulse into a unipolar one. In this work, it is shown that in a resonant medium a low-cycle pulse can be converted into two unipolar pulses separated in time by a distance that is an order of magnitude or more longer than the duration of the initial pulse. This allows in a number of problems to consider such pulses separately as unipolar. The estimation of the electric area value relative to its "atomic scale" is carried out.
Population density gratings induced by few-cycle optical pulses in a resonant medium