Complex-field measurement of ultrafast dynamic optical waveforms based on real-time spectral interferometry

Several methods are now available for single-shot measurement of the complex field (amplitude and phase profiles) of optical waveforms with resolutions down to the sub-picosecond range. As a main critical limitation, all these techniques exhibit measurement update rates typically slower than a few Hz. It would be very challenging to directly upgrade the update rate of any of these available methods beyond a few kHz. By combining spectral interferometry with dispersion-induced real-time optical Fourier transformation, here we demonstrate single-shot complex-field measurements of optical waveforms with a resolution of approximately 400 fs over a record length as long as approximately 350 ps, corresponding to a large record-length-to-resolution ratio of approximately 900. This performance is achieved at a measurement update rate of approximately 17 MHz, i.e. at least one thousand times faster than with any previous single-shot complex-field THz-bandwidth optical signal characterization method.