Abstract
In the past three decades, ultrafast pulse laser technology has greatly progressed and applied widely in many subjects, such as physics, chemistry, biology, materials, and so on. Accordingly, as well as for future developments, to measure or characterize the pulses temporally in femtosecond domain is indispensable but still challenging. Based on the operation principles, the measurement techniques can be classified into three categories: correlation, spectrogram, and spectral interferometry, which operate in time-domain, time-frequency combination, and frequency-domain, respectively. Here, we present a mini-review for these techniques, including their operating principles, development status, characteristics, and challenges.
Highlights
Since the 1990s, ultrashort pulse laser technology has greatly progressed
We review the developments of the technologies to measure ultrashort light pulses in recent years, which divides into three types: correlation [6,10], spectrogram [11,12], and spectral interferometry [7,8], which are based on time-domain, time-frequency combining, and frequency-domain measurements, respectively
The article is arranged as follows: Section 2 shows the basics of the ultrashort laser pulse; Sections 3–5 introduce the techniques based on correlation, spectrogram, and spectral interferometry, respectively; Section 6 is the Conclusion and Prospects
Summary
Since the 1990s, ultrashort pulse laser technology has greatly progressed. Nowadays, the peak power of laser pulse reaches up to PW [1], the intensity goes beyond 1022 W/cm2 [2,3], while the pulse width can be controlled at few-cycle even sub-cycle of light [4]. In the ultrashort pulse measurement, optical nonlinearity, as an all-rounder, e.g., frequency-conversion, correlation, spectral convolution, or time-filtering [6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13], plays a very important role. We review the developments of the technologies to measure ultrashort light pulses in recent years, which divides into three types: correlation [6,10], spectrogram [11,12], and spectral interferometry [7,8], which are based on time-domain, time-frequency combining, and frequency-domain measurements, respectively. Correlation is a simple, robust, and high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) method to obtain the pulse intensity information but without the phase information It is not suitable for characterizing pulses with complicated structures, e.g., asymmetric airy pulses [14], white-light supercontinuum [15]. The article is arranged as follows: Section 2 shows the basics of the ultrashort laser pulse; Sections 3–5 introduce the techniques based on correlation, spectrogram, and spectral interferometry, respectively; Section 6 is the Conclusion and Prospects
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