Abstract

Femtosecond laser pulses are widely used in many laboratories and are routinely adopted for many applications. In several cases it would be very important to have a diagnostic technique able to retrieve both temporal and spatial information about these pulses. This is particularly true in the study of beam filamentation in Kerr media and of conical waves [1], where wave packets with a non-trivial spatiotemporal structure are produced. Various experimental methods, such as frequency resolved optical gating (FROG), have been developed to perform temporal characterization. Very recently the extension of FROG to the simultaneous characterization of both space and time structures was described in Ref. [2].

© 2007 IEEE