Complete temporal characterization of short optical pulses using simplified chronocyclic tomography
15 August 2003
A new self-referencing technique to characterize the temporal electric field of short optical pulses is presented. The group delay of the pulse is directly obtained from the angular derivative of the frequency marginal of the rotated Wigner-Ville function in the chronocyclic space. The implementation is straightforward, as it only requires a frequency resolving device and a temporal phase modulator.
The experimental trace is composed of two spectra, from which the electric field is directly and algebraically reconstructed without any assumption. A device based on these principles was used to characterize the electric field of a 2 ps optical pulse, and its accuracy was confirmed by multiple consistency checks.