Abstract

The determination of the duration of visible or near-infrared optical pulses with subpicosecond duration has become a routine operation in ultrafast time-resolved spectroscopy. Several experimental methods have been demonstrated, which all rely on the same principle, transforming a time measurement requiring an ultrafast detector into a length measurement using a slow detector [1]. By far the most commonly used technique is the measurement of the sum frequency radiation which yields the autocorrelation of the pulse from which the pulse duration is extracted, assuming the pulse timeshape known. Recently, more sophisticated methods have been developed to obtain more precise knowledge of the pulse characteristics, such as its phase and amplitude [2-3]. However, to extend such measurements to the ultraviolet (UV) domain is a nontrivial task [4-5], for instance because of phase-matching or group velocity dispersion issues.

© 1997 Optical Society of America