Advanced phase retrieval for dispersion scan: a comparative study

Abstract

Dispersion scan is a self-referenced measurement technique for ultrashort pulses. Similar to frequency-resolved optical gating, the dispersion scan technique records the dependence of nonlinearly generated spectra as a function of a parameter. For the two mentioned techniques, these parameters are the delay and the dispersion, respectively. While dispersion scan seems to offer a number of potential advantages over other characterization methods, in particular for measuring few-cycle pulses, retrieval of the spectral phase from the measured traces has so far mostly relied on the Nelder-Mead algorithm, which has a tendency of stagnation in a local minimum and may produce ghost satellites in the retrieval of pulses with complex spectra. We evaluate three different strategies to overcome these retrieval problems, namely regularization, use of a generalized-projections algorithm, and an evolutionary retrieval algorithm. While all these measures are found to improve the precision and convergence of dispersion scan retrieval, differential evolution is found to provide the best performance, enabling the near-perfect retrieval of the phase of complex supercontinuum pulses within less than ten seconds, even in the presence of strong detection noise and limited phase-matching bandwidth of the nonlinear process.

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Cited by in corpus (9)

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• Characterizing ultrashort laser pulses with second harmonic dispersion scans
• Measurement of 10 fs pulses across the entire Visible to Near-Infrared Spectral Range
• Linear chirp instability analysis for ultrafast pulse metrology
• Discrete dispersion scan setup for measuring few-cycle laser pulses in the mid-infrared
• A review of ptychographic techniques for ultrashort pulse measurement
• Temporal characterization of broadband femtosecond laser pulses by third-harmonic dispersion scan with ptychographic retrieval
• Single-shot Dispersion Sampling for Optical Pulse Reconstruction