Full recovery of ultrafast waveforms lost under noise

The ability to detect ultrafast waveforms arising from randomly occurring events is essential to such diverse fields as bioimaging, spectroscopy, radio-astronomy, sensing and telecommunications. However, noise remains a significant challenge to recover the information carried by such waveforms, which are often too weak for detection. The key issue is that most of the undesired noise is contained within the broad frequency band of the ultrafast waveform, such that it cannot be alleviated through conventional methods. In spite of intensive research efforts, no technique can retrieve the complete description of a noise-dominated ultrafast waveform of unknown parameters. Here, we propose a signal denoising concept involving passive enhancement of the coherent content of the signal frequency spectrum, which enables the full recovery of arbitrary ultrafast waveforms buried under noise, in a real-time and single-shot fashion. We experimentally demonstrate the retrieval of picosecond-resolution waveforms that are over an order of magnitude weaker than the in-band noise. By granting access to previously undetectable information, this concept shows promise for advancing various fields dealing with weak or noise-dominated broadband waveforms.