Hearing overcome uncertainty relation and measure duration of ultrashort pulses

Ultrashort Pulses

Ultrashort pulses usually are defined as those lasting less than a nanosecond. Low-energetic ultrashort pulses can be used, for instance, as a probe for studying the dynamics of ultrafast processes. Amplifying these pulses can deliver extremely high peak power, allowing applications such as laser particle acceleration, or γ-ray generation via Compton scattering on relativistic electrons. Existi...

Measurement of Ultrashort Optical Pulses

Tailored-Beam Ultrashort Laser Pulses

Laser pulses with picosecond and femtosecond durations are now indispensable tools in many scientific disciplines. These ultrashort pulses provide unique temporal resolutions for investigations of phenomena taking place in comparable time ranges. In addition, optical energies squeezed into such short time windows yield extremely high peak powers and intensities, paving the way to generate unpre...

Using phase retrieval to measure the intensity and phase of ultrashort pulses: frequency-resolved optical gating

Received September 16, 1992; accepted October 9, 1992; revised manuscript received December 1, 1992 We recently introduced a new technique, frequency-resolved optical gating (FROG), for directly determining the full intensity I(t) and phase p(t) of a single femtosecond pulse. By using almost any instantaneous nonlinearoptical interaction of two replicas of the ultrashort pulse to be measured, F...

Duration of ultrashort pulses in the presence of spatio-temporal coupling.

We report on a simple method allowing one to decompose the duration of arbitrary ultrashort light pulses, potentially distorted by space-time coupling, into four elementary durations. Such a decomposition shows that, in linear optics, a spatio-temporal pulse can be stretched with respect to its Fourier limit by only three independent phenomena: nonlinear frequency dependence of the spectral pha...