Abstract
Observing and studying the evolution of rare non-repetitive natural phenomena such as optical rogue waves or dynamic chemical processes in living cells is a crucial necessity for developing science and technologies relating to them. One indispensable technique for investigating these fast evolutions is temporal imaging systems. However, just as conventional spatial imaging systems are incapable of capturing depth information of a three-dimensional scene, typical temporal imaging systems also lack this ability to retrieve depth information-different dispersions in a complex pulse. Therefore, enabling temporal imaging systems to provide these information with great detail would add a new facet to the analysis of ultra-fast pulses. In this paper, after discussing how spatial three-dimensional integral imaging could be generalized to the time domain, two distinct methods have been proposed in order to compensate for its shortcomings such as relatively low depth resolution and limited depth-of-field. The first method utilizes a curved time-lens array instead of a flat one, which leads to an improved viewing zone and depth resolution, simultaneously. The second one which widens the depth-of-field is based on the non-uniformity of focal lengths of time-lenses in the time-lens array. It has been shown that compared with conventional setup for temporal integral imaging, depth resolution, i.e. dispersion resolvability, and depth-of-field, i.e. the range of resolvable dispersions, have been improved by a factor of 2.5 and 1.87, respectively.
Highlights
Temporal imaging systems (TIS), since the last two decades, have gained variant applications ranging from optical communications [5], optical data acquisition and compression [6, 13] to ultrafast microscopy [12], quantum information processing [10, 11], spectroscopy [14, 15], and etc. [1,2,3,4]
We show numerical simulations of our proposed methods to confirm their superiority in view of DoF and depth resolution
Each of the TLs in the array has a temporal aperture equal to 10P s and their focal group delay dispersion (GDD) is chosen in a way to set the temporal depth resolution of the system at 25ps2
Summary
Temporal imaging systems (TIS), since the last two decades, have gained variant applications ranging from optical communications [5], optical data acquisition and compression [6, 13] to ultrafast microscopy [12], quantum information processing [10, 11], spectroscopy [14, 15], and etc. [1,2,3,4]. A research led by Fridman et al has introduced and analyzed both theoretically and experimentally a technique to extract temporal depth information [19] They used a method based on the relation between the lateral space of the images of two input pulses of different depth (dispersion) and their depth difference and lens location. Many researchers have introduced various methods to overcome some shortcomings of spatial InI such as low resolution and limited depth-of-field region Two of these methods which are highly effective are based on a curved lens array instead of a flat one and a non-uniform lens array in which different lenses have different focal lengths [31,32,33].
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