Ultrafast measurements of optical spectral coherence by single-shot time-stretch interferometry

The palette of laser technology has significantly been enriched by the innovations in ultrafast optical pulse generation. Our knowledge of the complex pulse dynamics, which is often highly nonlinear and stochastic in nature, is however limited by the scarcity of technologies that can measure fast variation/fluctuation of the spectral phase (or coherence) and amplitude in real-time, continuously. To achieve this goal, we demonstrate ultrafast interferometry enabled by optical time-stretch for real- time spectral coherence characterization with microsecond-resolution. Accessing the single-shot interferograms continuously, it further reveals the degree of second-order coherence, defined by the cross-spectral density function, at high speed-a capability absent in any existing spectroscopic measurement tools. As the technique can simultaneously measure both the high-speed variations of spectrally resolved coherence and intensity, time-stretch interferometry could create a new arena for ultrafast pulse characterization, especially favorable for probing and understanding the non-repetitive or stochastic dynamics in real-time.