Photonic Systems Brown Bag Seminar Series

Thursday, March 22, 2007

12 noon , RLE Haus Conf. Room 36-428

"Optical pulse characterization near the single-cycle limit"

 Jonathan Birge 

Aimed at a general EE audience, the talk will begin with an introduction to the topic of ultrafast optics and the generation of ultrashort pulses directly from lasers. The existing methods for measuring short pulses will be reviewed, along with a discussion on the difficulties that arise in pulse measurement, especially as the single-cycle limit is approached. Motivated by the present development of such sources in our lab and others', we have developed a new method for pulse characterization, Two-Dimensional Spectral shearing Interferometry (2DSI), designed to reliably characterize single-cycle pulses with high precision. I will explain the method, and show initial experimental results on the measurement of 5 fs pulses to within a phase error of 35 as over the full pulse bandwidth. I will also discuss our current work on extending 2DSI to allow full 3D spatio-temporal measurements.