Abstract

The invention of ultrashort pulse generation immediately provoked the necessity to measure the duration of these pulses. There is a variety of measurement techniques. As probably the most widely used technique for a full characterization of both amplitude and phase of ultrashort laser pulses, frequency-resolved optical gating [1,2] or FROG has emerged. An iterative reconstruction algorithm like the well-known principal components generalized projections (PCGP [3]) algorithm is typically used to reconstruct the pulse’s complex electric field from the measured FROG spectrogram. Among all techniques for full amplitude-and-phase measurement, the SHG FROG method is the easiest to implement. It is robust and no reference pulse is needed. Here we concentrate on SHG FROG measurements as the most widely used technique.

© 2015 IEEE