Practical, open source, GPU-accelerated, high-fidelity phase retrieval by simultaneous propagations.

Phase retrieval is a highly useful technique that allows the calculation of the complex electric field of a beam of spatially coherent radiation based only on recordings of intensity profiles with a camera. In this work, we demonstrate what we believe, to the best of our knowledge, is a new technique for single-beam multiple-intensity phase retrieval based on simultaneous propagations that provides improved fidelity results compared to standard methods (0.9931 compared to 0.

Influence of pump beam shaping and noise on performance of a direct diode-pumped ultrafast Ti:sapphire laser.

One of the major factors that limits the widespread use of ultrafast titanium sapphire (Ti:S) lasers in life science is its expensive and complex pump source. Broad area diode laser (BA-DL) based pump sources have high potential to solve this problem, since they are compact, inexpensive and very efficient. However, their non-diffraction limited beam profile makes it challenging to achieve high powers in Kerr-lens mode-locked (KLM) operation of Ti:S lasers.