Single-shot polarization-resolved ultrafast mapping photography

TL;DR

This paper introduces PUMP, a polarization-resolved ultrafast imaging technique that captures 16 frames of femtosecond-scale dynamics in a single shot, surpassing traditional electronic detector speed limits.

Contribution

The authors develop a novel polarization-based method for ultrafast imaging that converts temporal information into polarization, enabling single-shot capture of femtosecond dynamics.

Findings

Achieved 850 fs temporal resolution.

Captured 16 frames of femtosecond laser ablation.

Demonstrated potential for ultrafast science applications.

Abstract

Single-shot ultrafast optical imaging plays a very important role in the detection of transient scenes, especially in capturing irreversible or stochastic dynamic scenes. To break the limit of time response speed of electronic devices, such as charge-coupled device (CCD) or complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor (CMOS) detectors, ultrafast optical imaging techniques usually convert the time information of a transient scene into the wavelength, angle, space or spatial frequency of the illumination light in previous studies. In this work, we propose a novel polarization-resolved ultrafast mapping photography (PUMP) technique by converting the time information into the polarization. Here, the spatiotemporal information of a dynamic scene is loaded into a rotationally polarized illumination laser pulse, and a polarization filtering in imaging detection and a deconvolution algorithm in image reconstruction are used to extract the original dynamic scene. In our PUMP system, the temporal resolution is 850 fs, the spatial resolution is 28.5 lp/mm at 700 micrometer by 700 micrometer field of view, and the number of frames is 16. By using PUMP, a spatiotemporal dynamics of femtosecond laser ablation in an indium tin oxide film on glass substrate is successfully captured. PUMP provides a new solution for measuring the transient scenes in a snapshot, which will bring a very wide range of applications in the field of ultrafast science.