Autocorrelation of laser pulses by optical processing of Fabry-Perot spectrograms

This paper describes the principles and experimental implementation of a new optical technique based on Fourier analysis for second-order statistics of short coherent light pulses. Using only passive filtering operations, we obtained images of the autocorrelation functions of the optical fields of light pulses, derived from ode-locked Nd:YAG laser pulses, with 40-psec to 4-nsec duration. An application of the method to a shaped sequence of 40-psec pulses is reported.