Accelerating ultrafast spectroscopy with compressive sensing

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that compressive sensing can drastically reduce data acquisition time in ultrafast spectroscopy, enabling faster experiments and protecting fragile samples by requiring fewer measurements.

Contribution

It introduces the application of compressive sensing to ultrafast spectroscopy, achieving significant reductions in measurement time while maintaining data quality.

Findings

Achieved accurate spectral estimates with only 15% of measurements

Demonstrated a 6-fold reduction in data acquisition time

Validated the approach on multiple ultrafast spectroscopy techniques

Abstract

Ultrafast spectroscopy is an important tool for studying photoinduced dynamical processes in atoms, molecules, and nanostructures. Typically, the time to perform these experiments ranges from several minutes to hours depending on the choice of spectroscopic method. It is desirable to reduce this time overhead to not only to shorten time and laboratory resources, but also to make it possible to examine fragile specimens which quickly degrade during long experiments. In this article, we motivate using compressive sensing to significantly shorten data acquisition time by reducing the total number of measurements in ultrafast spectroscopy. We apply this technique to experimental data from ultrafast transient absorption spectroscopy and ultrafast terahertz spectroscopy and show that good estimates can be obtained with as low as 15% of the total measurements, implying a 6-fold reduction in data acquisition time.