Abstract
We report on a simple method allowing one to decompose the duration of arbitrary ultrashort light pulses, potentially distorted by space-time coupling, into four elementary durations. Such a decomposition shows that, in linear optics, a spatio-temporal pulse can be stretched with respect to its Fourier limit by only three independent phenomena: nonlinear frequency dependence of the spectral phase over the whole spatial extent of the pulse, spectral amplitude inhomogeneities in space, and spectral phase inhomogeneities in space. We illustrate such a decomposition using numerical simulations of complex spatio-temporal femtosecond and attosecond pulses. Finally we show that the contribution of two of these three effects to the pulse duration is measurable without any spectral phase characterization.
Highlights
The generation, manipulation and characterization of ultrashort light pulses have become an area of considerable interest in the past few decades
One major assumption in ultrafast optics is that time and space are uncoupled variables, which means that an ultrashort pulse can be described as the product of a time dependent pulse shape with a space dependent beam profile [3]
We show that the contributions of three of the four elementary durations to the global pulse duration are measurable without any spectral phase characterization
Summary
The generation, manipulation and characterization of ultrashort light pulses have become an area of considerable interest in the past few decades Such pulses allow probing ultrafast phenomena such as chemical reactions [1] using femtosecond pulses, or the electronic motion in molecules [2] thanks to the decrease of the pulse duration down to the attosecond time scale. We report on a way to decompose the root mean square (RMS) global pulse duration of a spatio-temporal pulse into four basic durations based on the behavior of the complex spectrum versus frequency and space. Each of these durations has a simple physical explanation. We show that the contributions of three of the four elementary durations to the global pulse duration are measurable without any spectral phase characterization
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