High-bandwidth measurement of femtosecond optical pulse timing based on two-dimensional transmission gating and parallel processing

Abstract

We demonstrate a high-bandwidth, precision timing measurement technique using a surface-normal two-dimensional (2D) all-optical switch and a parallel computational sensor array to achieve high-density, parallel extraction of timing information of femtosecond optical pulses. Optoelectronic parallel processing eliminates the bottleneck of conventional systems and achieves femtosecond precision and robust timing extraction using a simple on-chip algorithm. The timing fluctuation of 1- kHz, 100-fs optical pulses was extracted on a pulse-by-pulse basis.