Nonlinear space-time processing of femtosecond laser pulses

We describe various optical techniques for processing and detection of femtosecond laser pulses. Photorefractive and cascaded second order nonlinear wave mixing are used for space-to-time conversion, transforming space domain information into ultrafast temporal waveforms. An inverse operation that transforms a femtosecond pulse sequence into a quasi-stationary spatial image is performed with spectral domain three wave-mixing. We also demonstrate single-shot phase sensitive femtosecond pulse detection with two-photon absorption in a conventional silicon detector array. This approach allows efficient detection of wide-bandwidth ultrafast signals in the wavelength range of 1-2 μm.

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