Achromatic and Single-beam Pulse Characterization Technique for Visible-UV Pulses based on direct UV Pulse Shaping and Cross-polarized Wave Generation

Ultrashort pulse characterization techniques based on second harmonic generation (SHG), such as frequency resolved optical gating (SH-FROG), were developed for the near infrared and cannot be easily transposed to the UV and the visible because of the lack of suited and efficient non linear crystals for broadband SHG. Such difficulties can be overcome by the use of a third order non linear effect such as induced birefringence which is achromatic and frequency conserving. We demonstrate a single beam, achromatic, programmable and self-compensated spectrally resolved interferometric autocorrelation technique which overcomes such drawbacks. This technique is based on the conjugate use of cross-polarized wave generation (XPW), an exotic third order non linear effect, and of an UV acousto-optic programmable dispersive filter (UV-AOPDF) which is used to produce pulse replicas with interferometric control within the acousto-optic crystal.