Phase retrieval of nanosecond laser pulses based on temporal shearing interferomentry

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Temporal shearing interferometry is proposed to measure the temporal phase distribution of nanosecond laser pulses. In the proposed scheme, the pulse to be measured is divided into two pulses with a delay of hundreds of picoseconds in between, arbitrary one of the two pulses is added to by an appropriate amount of frequency shift, then is combined with the remaining pulse, thereby obtaining the temporal shearing interferogram that is recorded by a normal photodiode. The temporal phase distribution is calculated by an adaptive algorithm based on Fourier transform, and further the precise spectra of the measured pulse can also be calculated according to the Fourier relation between time domain and spectral domain. Based on the systematic analysis of the principle of the technology, the proposed technology is verified by numerical simulation. And the influence of the variable parameters including noise, relative delay, relative intensity on the measured error are systematically analyzed in the simulation. And the results show that the proposed nanosecond temporal phase diagnostic technique has a good performance when the signal noise ratio of the interferogram is above 15 dB, the relative delay of the pulses is between 0.5% and 28% and the relative intensity is above 0.1%. The proposed method is verified experimentally in a nanosecond laser system with central wavelength of 640 nm and pulse width of 20 ns. And the calculated spectra obtained from the temporal shearing interferogram match well with the spectra measured by a scanning Fabry-Perot interferometer. This proposed technique does not use any nonlinear optical effects, thus it can be applied to the diagnostic of nanosecond laser pulse centered at any wavelength. Hence, it provides a simple experimental setup for implementing the higher-accuracy diagnostic of the temporal phase distribution of nanosecond laser pulses.