Spectrally resolved interferometric auto-correlation technique for femtosecond optical measurements

Summary form only given. The last decade has demonstrated an advance from optical correlators to more complicated techniques, such as frequency resolved optical gating (FROG) or spectral phase interferometry for direct E-field reconstruction (SPIDER). Sub-10-fs pulses were characterized using these methods. When using second harmonic generation (SHG) and single-shot geometry, these methods allow non-scanning measurements of low energy pulses. While SPIDER uses interference patterns for non-iterative pulse reconstruction, SHG-FROG requires an iterative algorithm. A new diagnostic reported here, simplifies the pulse retrieval procedure and combines the advantage of interferometry with the reliability of FROG.