Optics Innovations
Swamp Optics LLC: Everything You’ve Always Wanted to Know About Ultrashort Pulses, But Were Afraid to Ask
In order to measure an event in time, you need a shorter one. So how do you measure the shortest one? This dilemma initiated a scientific odyssey that culminated in the founding of Swamp Optics.
The shortest events ever created are ultrashort laser pulses. The results of experiments and applications using them depend sensitively on their properties, so a technique for measuring them is crucial. In the 1960s, researchers realized that the best they could hope to do was to use the event to measure itself and so introduced a technique called autocorrelation based on this approach.
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