Abstract

Because of the difficulty in resolving optical pulses on a femtosecond scale with electronic detectors, many techniques to indirectly obtain pulse shapes have been developed. Frequency-resolved optical gating is one of the most commonly used measurement methods.¹ It provides a two-dimensional dataset known to suffice for uniquely determining both amplitude and phase of a pulse. Nonetheless, aiming at less complex experimental setups and faster convergence of retrieval algorithms, some researchers have invented pulse-retrieval methods using one-dimensional datasets generated from conventional measurements, such as electric-field and interferometric autocorrelations.^2–4 These approaches, however, may raise nontrivial ambiguity problems unless sufficient data are involved.

© 2001 Optical Society of America