Abstract

A self-referencing technique for measuring amplitude and phase of ultrashort laser pulses is presented. In contrast to the other methods the relative-phase ambiguities do not appear in our method. Thus, we can characterize ultrashort pulses with well-separated frequency components. The relative-phase ambiguities can be avoided by the use of a cross-correlation technique with two independent laser pulses. Further we propose and demonstrate experimentally a new realtime phase-retrieval algorithm that reconstructs both pulses fast and uniquely. © 2009 IOP Publishing Ltd.