Measuring Spatiotemporal Distortions with GRENOUILLE

Abstract

Researchers often implicitly assume in their ultrafast studies that their laser beams have separable spatial and temporal dependencies. This underlying assumption greatly simplifies the theoretical treatment of ultrashort laser pulses, but is increasingly difficult to maintain as ever shorter pulse lengths and ever greater bandwidths are routinely generated in ultrafast laboratories. With a large frequency bandwidth, any imperfect operations, such as the stretching, compression, and amplification of ultrashort laser pulses, tend to introduce spatiotemporal distortions, which can be detrimental to the application of these pulses.