Analysis of ultrashort pulse-shape measurement using linear interferometers

Characterization of mid-infrared femtosecond pulses [Invited]

“…It is well known that stationary self-referenced methods for measuring ultrashort pulses require the use of nonlinear optical processes [6,35,36]. The measurement of mid-IR pulses is no exception to this general rule and usually relies on direct transpositions of methods previously developed for measuring visible pulses, such as second-order interferometric autocorrelation [37], secondharmonic generation frequency-resolved optical gating (SHG FROG) [38], and spectral phase interferometry for direct electric-field reconstruction (SPIDER) [7].…”

Time-dependent spectrum of a single photon and its positive-operator-valued measure

“…Whereas measuring the frequency of light has been relatively straightforward since Newton's days, measuring the time of arrival (on, say, a picosecond timescale) tends to be much harder. One nice way to achieve a high-resolution time measurement is to measure the frequency after first sending the photon through a time-to-frequency converter [17][18][19][20][21][22]. Here one first lets the photon propagate through a dispersive element that multiplies the spectral amplitude of the photon with a phase factor exp(−iαω 2 /2), with α a constant, and subsequently one applies a time-dependent phase modulation that multiplies the temporal amplitude with a similar phase shift exp(−iβt 2 /2) in the time-domain.…”

The criterion of pulse reconstruction quality based on Wigner representation

“…SPIDER is a relatively new method, which can be regarded as a version of the self-referencing interferometry with spectral shearing [28]. In SPIDER the spectral phase is reconstructed S111 from a spectral interferogram produced by two replicas of the pulse to be characterized.…”