Partially coherent ultrafast spectrography

Modern ultrafast metrology relies on the postulate that the pulse to be measured is fully coherent, that is, that it can be completely described by its spectrum and spectral phase. However, synthesizing fully coherent pulses is not always possible in practice, especially in the domain of emerging ultrashort X-ray sources where temporal metrology is strongly needed. Here we demonstrate how frequency-resolved optical gating (FROG), the first and one of the most widespread techniques for pulse characterization, can be adapted to measure partially coherent pulses even down to the attosecond timescale. No modification of experimental apparatuses is required; only the processing of the measurement changes. To do so, we take our inspiration from other branches of physics where partial coherence is routinely dealt with, such as quantum optics and coherent diffractive imaging. This will have important and immediate applications, such as enabling the measurement of X-ray free-electron laser pulses despite timing jitter.