Michelson-type all-reflective interferometric autocorrelation in the VUV regime

We demonstrate second-order interferometric autocorrelation of a pulse in the vacuum-ultraviolet (VUV) spectral range using an optical arrangement equivalent to a Michelson interferometer. In an all-reflective design, wavefront splitting is realized with two moveable interdigitated reflective gratings forming a diffraction pattern with well separated orders and an intensity distribution depending on the precisely adjustable path-length difference. An imaging timeof-flight spectrometer is able to spatially select ions created by nonlinear twophoton absorption in the focus of the zeroth diffraction order. This arrangement is used to demonstrate interferometric autocorrelation in krypton with femtosecond VUV pulses at 160 nm wavelength. In addition to the pulse duration, which is already accessible with non-collinear intensity autocorrelation, the full interferometric contrast of the presented approach enables us to extract also information on temporal phases.