Determining the absolute temporal field of ultra-broadband terahertz-infrared pulses with field-induced second-harmonic spectrograms.

We demonstrate the use of spectrograms of the field-induced second-harmonic (FISH) signal generated in ambient air, to reconstruct the absolute temporal electric field of ultra-broadband terahertz-infrared (THz-IR) pulses with bandwidths exceeding 100 THz. The approach is applicable even with relatively long (150-femtosecond) optical detection pulses, where the relative intensity and phase can be extracted from the moments of the spectrogram, as demonstrated by transmission spectroscopy of very thin samples. Auxiliary EFISH/ABCD measurements are used to provide the absolute field and phase calibration, respectively.