Single Shot Amplitude and Phase Characterization of Optical Arbitrary Waveforms

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel single-shot method for characterizing the spectral amplitude and phase of ultrafast optical waveforms with high bandwidth and temporal resolution, enabling real-time waveform analysis.

Contribution

The authors demonstrate the first single-shot measurement technique for optical waveforms using time-gated dual quadrature spectral interferometry, achieving record-length and high-resolution characterization.

Findings

Successful single-shot retrieval of ultrafast waveforms

High temporal resolution of 1 ps over 100 ps record length

Capability to analyze both static and dynamically generated waveforms

Abstract

Using a time-gated dual quadrature spectral interferometry technique, for the first time we demonstrate single-shot characterization of both spectral amplitude and phase of ~1THz bandwidth optical arbitrary waveforms generated from a 10 GHz frequency comb. Our measurements provide a temporal resolution of 1ps over a record length of 100ps. Singleshot characterization becomes particularly relevant when waveform synthesis operations are updated at the repetition rate of the comb allowing creation of potentially infinite record length waveforms. We first demonstrate unambiguous single shot retrieval using rapidly updating waveforms. We then perform additional single-shot measurements of static user-defined waveforms generated via line-by-line pulse shaping.