Simplified spectral phase interferometry for direct electric-field reconstruction by using a thick nonlinear crystal

Abstract

We propose and demonstrate a novel implementation of spectral-shearing interferometry (SSI) for reconstructing the electric field of ultrashort pulses by utilizing asymmetric group velocity matching in a long nonlinear crystal. The proposed configuration eliminates the requirement for a linearly chirped auxiliary pulse that is in common in all existing SSI methods, relying on nonlinear conversion to produce a spectral shear.