Feature

Measuring Ultrashort Laser Pulses Just Got a Lot Easier

Rick Trebino, Patrick O’Shea, Mark Kimmel, and Xun Gu

In the past decade, great advances have occurred in the field of ultrashort-pulse measurement. New classes of more powerful methods now yield much more information, in particular, the full intensity and phase of the pulse vs. time. But simplicity has never been the goal. In fact, these new techniques have actually increased in complexity. They all incorporate an autocorrelator and add additional components—sometimes a great many of them.