Abstract

The characterization of picosecond and femtosecond laser pulses is an involved problem. Typically, nonlinear techniques, based on the use of either two-photon fluorescence or higher harmonic generation, are used to characterize the second- or higher-order autocorrelation functions of the pulses. These techniques can, in principle, provide information through a numerical deconvolution of the actual temporal profile of the pulses. Unfortunately, they have a major limit in the fact that they average over many laser pulses thus ruling out the possibility of analyzing the stability of the delivered pulses. In fact, there is no way to know the stability of pulse length and mode size of pulses shorter than 100 ps.

© 1988 Optical Society of America