Complete temporal characterization of short optical pulses by simplified chronocyclic tomography

A new self-referencing technique to characterize the temporal electric field of a short optical pulse is presented. The group delay of the pulse is directly obtained from two projections of the Wigner-Ville function after rotation of the pulse in chronocyclic space. Implementation of the technique requires only quadratic temporal phase modulation and two spectrum measurements, from which the electric field is directly and unambiguously reconstructed without any assumption. A device based on these principles is used to characterize the electric field of a 2-ps optical pulse.