Abstract
Synthesis of arbitrarily shaped femtosecond optical waveforms has recently been achieved by masking the optical frequency components that are spatially dispersed within a simple grating and lens apparatus.1 The spatial mask acts as a linear filter that manipulates the phases and amplitudes of the spatially dispersed spectral components; the shaped pulse corresponds to the Fourier transform of the pattern transferred by the mask onto the spectrum. In this paper we demonstrate additional signal processing operations, such as time-reversal, correlation, and convolution, which cannot be achieved using simple linear filtering. Our demonstration relies on spectral holography within a femtosecond pulse shaping apparatus. Two input beams are incident on the holographic pulse shaper—a shaped signal beam, generated using a CPM dye laser and a second, programmable pulse shaper,2 and an unshaped 100-fsec reference beam. The interference pattern between these two beams, which are spectrally dispersed within the pulse shaping apparatus, is recorded on a thermoplastic plate. The resulting spectral hologram can be read out using an unshaped reference pulse to yield both real and time-reversed (virtual) replicas of the original signal pulse. Convolution and correlation operations are performed by using shaped pulses for readout.
© 1991 Optical Society of America
PDF ArticleMore Like This
A.M. Weiner, D.E. Leaird, D.H. Reitze, and E.G. Paek
ME1 International Conference on Ultrafast Phenomena (UP) 1992
A. M. Weiner and D. E. Leaird
CFB6 Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics (CLEO:S&I) 1993
A. M. Weiner, D. E. Leaird, D. H. Reitze, and E. G. Paek
CTuB1 Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics (CLEO:S&I) 1992