How to measure the amplitude and phase of an ultrashort light pulse with an autocorrelator and a spectrometer

Author

Paye, Jérôme

Author_Institution

Res. Lab. of Electron., MIT, Cambridge, MA, USA

Volume

30

Issue

11

fYear

1994

fDate

11/1/1994 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

2693

Lastpage

2697

Abstract

The measurement of the spectrum of the output of an autocorrelator is proven to be sufficient for a complete determination of the complex electric field of an ultrashort light pulse, both in amplitude and phase, except for the time-reversal ambiguity which can be easily overcome in experiments. An iterative algorithm is proposed to retrieve the complex electric held from the experimental data. A numerical simulation proves the remarkable reliability and efficiency of the method. An experimental demonstration shows the simplicity of this technique

Keywords

electric field measurement; high-speed optical techniques; iterative methods; numerical analysis; optical correlation; optical variables measurement; visible spectrometers; amplitude; autocorrelator; complex electric field; iterative algorithm; numerical simulation; output; phase; spectrally resolved autocorrelation; spectrometer; time-reversal ambiguity; ultrashort light pulse measurement; Autocorrelation; Electric variables measurement; Frequency domain analysis; Frequency measurement; Iterative algorithms; Optical pulse generation; Phase measurement; Pulse measurements; Pulse shaping methods; Shape measurement;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Quantum Electronics, IEEE Journal of

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

0018-9197

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/3.333728

Filename

333728