Abstract

Several methods for the full characterization of ultrashort optical signals have been developed. There are interferometric methods like spectral phase interferometry for direct electric field reconstruction (SPIDER [1]) or measurement of the electric field by interferometric spectral trace observation (MEFISTO [2]) and spectrographic techniques such as frequency-resolved optical gating (FROG [3]) or temporal analysis of spectral components (TASC [4]). All of these methods have one thing in common. They can not recover ultrashort pulses with well-separated frequency components due to relative-phase ambiguities [5]. However, such pulses appear rather frequently for example in soliton molecules [6].

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