Measurement of Ultrashort Pulses

During recent years the development of fast photodetectors has made impressive progress. For example, PIN photodiodes (Vol. 1, Sect. 4.5) are available with a rise time of 20 ps [760]. The easiest and cheapest way to achieve measurements of pulses with AT 10 s is through detection by photodiodes, CCD detectors or photomultipliers, as discussed in Vol. 1, Sect. 4.5. However, until now the only detector 

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Applications making use of the nonlinear absorption of dyes are passive Q-switching in solid-state lasers, pulse shaping, pulse intensity measurements of high-power ultrashort pulses, optical isolation between amplifier stages of high power solid-state lasers, and pulse width measurements of ultrashort pulses by the two-photon-fluorescence (TPF) method. 

Recently, measurements of ultrashort pulses have attracted much attention. In all cases, except the case of Treacy using the compression technique, the experiments measure only the pulse-width. Both the second-harmonic-generation technique and the two-phonon-fluorescence technique are inherently symmetric. They measure the auto cor-... 

D.N. Fittinghoff, K.W. DeLong, and R. Trebino, Noise Sensitivity in Frequency-Resolved Optical-Gating Measurements of Ultrashort Pulses , J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 12, 1955 (1995). 

The exciting and rapid developments of recent years in the generation and measurement of ultrashort pulses (1-3), with pulse durations now as short as 30 femtoseconds (30 x 10 s (4)), are driving the exploration of new physics and chemistry in condensed media in systems as diverse as semiconductors and cytochrome C. 

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