Spatio-temporal characterization of intense few-cycle 2 μm pulses.

We present a variant of spatially encoded spectral shearing interferometry for measuring two-dimensional spatio-temporal slices of few-cycle pulses centered around 2 μm. We demonstrate experimentally that the device accurately retrieves the pulse-front tilt caused by angular dispersion of two-cycle pulses. We then use the technique to characterize 500-650 μJ pulses from a hollow fiber pulse compressor, with durations as short as 7.

Time-domain ptychography of over-octave-spanning laser pulses in the single-cycle regime.

We report, to the best of our knowledge, the first application of time-domain ptychography for the characterization of few-cycle laser pulses. Our method enables zero-additional phase measurements of over-octave-spanning laser pulses in the single cycle regime. The spectral phase is recovered using a robust ptychography algorithm that requires no input apart from the measured data trace.

Self-referenced characterization of space-time couplings in near-single-cycle laser pulses.

We report on the characterization of space-time couplings in high-energy sub-2-cycle 770 nm laser pulses using a self-referencing single-frame method. Using spatially encoded arrangement filter-based spectral phase interferometry for direct electric field reconstruction, we characterize few-cycle pulses with a wavefront rotation of 2.8×10  rev/s (1.