Temporal Imaging of Incoherent-Light Intensity Waveforms Based on a Gated Time-Lens System

We experimentally demonstrate temporal imaging of incoherent-light intensity waveforms using a combination of a temporal gating process and a time lens. This design allows one to set the system temporal field of view and resolution in an independent fashion, thus overcoming the intrinsic time-bandwidth product tradeoff of previous incoherent-light schemes based on the temporal pinhole camera concept. In a proof-of-concept experiment, we report incoherent-light temporal compression of intensity waveforms by a factor of 2.86, with a time-bandwidth product exceeding 300, i.e., resolution of ~26 ps (approximately fourfold improvement over the corresponding pinhole-only design) along a temporal field of view of ~8 ns, using a basic linear-optics setup.