Abstract

Chirped spectral interferometry for the measurement of a transient refractive index variation was realized in earlier work by linearly chirping a reference and a probe beam simultaneously so that each slice of the temporal refractive index variation is projected onto a different frequency component.^1,2 The complete temporal phase variation can be obtained from one-to-one mapping between the frequency and time. However, aside from resolution limits imposed by the spectrometer, there is a fundamental limitation determined by the spectral bandwidth and the degree of chirp of the probe pulse.¹ Because a finite narrow spectral bandwidth with a large amount of Chirp distorts the original temporal phase, as demonstrated in this experiment, the generation of a very broadband spectrum is crucial to improve the temporal resolution of SSI.

© 2002 Optical Society of America