Measurement of 10 fs pulses across the entire Visible to Near-Infrared Spectral Range

• Published in: Scientific reports Vol. 10; no. 1; p. 4690
• Main Authors: Johnson, Allan S, Amuah, Emmanuel B, Brahms, Christian, Wall, Simon
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: England Nature Publishing Group 13.03.2020; Nature Publishing Group UK
• Subjects: Electric fields; Gating; Laboratories; Materials science; Silicon
• ISSN: 2045-2322; 2045-2322
• DOI: 10.1038/s41598-020-61620-z

Tuneable ultrafast laser pulses are a powerful tool for measuring difficult-to-access degrees of freedom in materials science. In general these experiments require the ability to address resonances and excitations both above and below the bandgap of materials, and to probe their response at the timescale of the fastest non-trivial internal dynamics. This drives the need for ultrafast sources capable of delivering 10-15 fs duration pulses tuneable across the entire visible (VIS) and near infrared (NIR) range, 500- 3000 nm, as well as the characterization of these sources. Here we present a single frequency-resolved optical gating (FROG) system capable of self-referenced characterization of pulses with 10 fs duration across the entire VIS-NIR spectral range. Our system does not require auxiliary beams and only minor reconfiguration for different wavelengths. We demonstrate the system with measurements of pulses across the entire tuning range.