Temporal zone plate.

This paper extends the investigation of zone plates to the temporal case. By exploiting the space-time duality between the paraxial diffraction of beams in space and the linear dispersion of optical pulses, we present the time-domain analog of a multiple imaging system. The temporal system is created by using a digital chirp signal generator together with two dispersive delay lines.

Radio-frequency spectrum analysis of a jittery train after a second-order dispersive Talbot line.

The power spectral density of the intensity of coherent Gaussian pulse trains suffering timing jitter after a dispersive line with arbitrary first- (beta(2)) and second-order (beta(3)) dispersion is computed in the small-signal approximation. Due to timing jitter noise, the initial radio-frequency spectrum shows noise bands whose bandwidth and position depend, respectively, on the jitter's standard deviation and on the jitter's pulse-to-pulse correlation. After setting the accumulated first-order dispersion to Talbot conditions, it is shown that the influence on the noise spectrum is a multiplicative factor with a multiple-bandpass structure.