The evaluation of electrooptic-sampling including diffraction and aperture masking of a tilted astigmatic Gaussian sampling beam

Electrooptic-sampling necessitates a variety of probing geometries which include tilted astigmatic Gaussian sampling beams, whose field distribution has to be taken into consideration in the evaluation of the electrooptic-sampling signal. The generation of a tilted beam can be accomplished via an off-axis focussing lens. The formalism of ray matrices in geometrical optics is not adequate for waves with a field component in direction of the beam propagation. However, using Fresnels diffraction integral we derived the complex beam parameters for off-axis systems which are valid for half apex angles less than 12/spl deg/. In addition, the sampling beam undergoes diffraction and aperture masking.