Revealing carrier-envelope phase through frequency mixing and interference in frequency resolved optical gating

• Published in: Optics express Vol. 23; no. 7; pp. 8507 - 8518
• Main Authors: Snedden, E W, Walsh, D A, Jamison, S P
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States 06.04.2015
• ISSN: 1094-4087; 1094-4087
• DOI: 10.1364/oe.23.008507

We demonstrate that full temporal characterisation of few-cycle electromagnetic pulses, including retrieval of the carrier envelope phase (CEP), can be directly obtained from Frequency Resolved Optical Gating (FROG) techniques in which the interference between non-linear frequency mixing processes is resolved. We derive a framework for this scheme, defined Real Domain FROG (ReD-FROG), for the cases of interference between sum and difference frequency components and between fundamental and sum / difference frequency components. A successful numerical demonstration of ReD-FROG as applied to the case of a self-referenced measurement is provided. A proof-of-principle experiment is performed in which the CEP of a single-cycle THz pulse is accurately obtained and demonstrates the possibility for THz detection beyond optical probe duration limitations inherent to electro-optic sampling.