Polarimetric‐Spectral‐Sensitive Compressed Ultrafast Photography Enables Real‐Time Intensity Visualization of Time‐Varying Polarized Ultrafast Laser Pulses

Abstract

Ultrafast laser pulses with complex spatiotemporal and polarization couplings have shown great application prospects in coherent control, particle acceleration, molecular dynamics excitation, and chiral or anisotropic detection. It is very important to observe the polarization‐coupled ultrafast laser pulses for characterizing the performance of laser source and understanding the laser‐matter interaction, but there is currently no detection technique that can completely characterize them, including the spatio‐, spectral‐, and polarimetric‐temporal information. In this work, a polarimetric‐spectral‐sensitive has been compressed ultrafast photography (PS‐CUP) to realize the real‐time intensity visualization of time‐varying polarized (TP) ultrafast laser pulses. PS‐CUP can not only distinguish the polarization state of a TP pulse, but also realize the spatio‐, spectral‐ and polarimetric‐temporal measurement. To demonstrate the ability of polarization resolving detection, PS‐CUP is used to successfully distinguish between the sinistral and dextral TP pulses and measure the angle and degree of linear polarization of a dextral TP pulse, respectively, and the experimental results are highly consistent with theoretical simulations. Owing to the unprecedented multidimensional detection ability, PS‐CUP is prospected to provide a powerful tool for the diagnosis of various complex ultrafast laser pulses and the detection of ultrafast chiral optics.