Recent Progress Toward Real-Time Measurement of Ultrashort Laser Pulses

Frequency-resolved optical gating (FROG) is a technique that produces a spectrogram of an ultrashort laser pulse optically. While a great deal of information about the pulse can be gleaned from its FROG trace, often it is desirable to obtain all of the pulse information immediately, in real time. Quantitative information about the pulse is not readily obtainable from its spectrogram without the use of a two-dimensional phase retrieval algorithm. While current algorithms are quite robust, retrieval of all the pulse information can be slow. In this paper, I describe a recently developed FROG trace inversion algorithm called Principal Component Generalized Projects that is fast, robust, and can invert FROG traces in real time. A femtosecond oscilloscope based on second-harmonic generation FROG is also described that uses this new algorithm to rapidly (up to 2.3 Hz) and continuously display the intensity and phase of ultrashort laser pulses.