Intelligent single-shot full-field characterization over femtosecond pulses.

Abstract

Conventional approaches to femtosecond (fs) pulse characterization depend on nonlinearities without exception, thereby impeding their utilization in measuring weak fs pulses. Their reliance on iterative phase retrieval or spectrometer-based readout further prevents single-shot full-field characterization over high-repetition-rate fs pulse trains. Here, we present linear spectral shearing interferometry (LSSI) based intelligent single-shot full-field characterization (ISFC) towards high-repetition-rate fs pulse trains, where both intensity and phase of fs pulses are reconstructed in single shot from temporal interferograms through a well-trained fully-connected neural network. The spectral shear in LSSI is created completely by linear effects enabling measurement of weak fs pulses. We validate the proposed method on a megahertz fs pulse train with picojoule-level energy. Moreover, the switching dynamics of a programmable spectral filter are successfully resolved with the proposed method at a megahertz frame rate. We anticipate LSSI-based ISFC to be a particularly powerful tool for characterizing weak ultraviolet fs pulses, and even attosecond pulses with high repetition rates.