Measuring pulse-front tilt in ultrashort pulse laser beams without ambiguity of its sign using single-shot tilted pulse-front autocorrelator

The measurement of pulse-front tilt (PFT) in ultrashort pulse laser beams, without ambiguity of its sign, has been carried out using an in-house built single-shot tilted pulse-front autocorrelator (TPFAC) based on second harmonic generation in non-linear crystal. The experiment is carried out for the beam propagation through a single prism and a pair of prisms. Expressions of PFT angle have been derived to account for beam size, beam propagation effects and for arbitrary incidence of the laser beam. The measured PFT angles were found in accordance with theoretically calculated values. The calculated sensitivity of TPFAC is found to be larger than that offered by the other techniques.