The Real-Time Temporal and Spatial Diagnostics of Ultrashort High-Power Laser Pulses using an All-Reflective Single-Shot Autocorrelator

Abstract

An all-reflective, simple noncollinear second harmonic (SH) autocorrelator is described for monitoring the shot-to-shot behavior of ultrashort high-power laser pulses. Two mirrors are used for the dispersion-free splitting of a pulse into two halves. One of the mirrors is able to adjust the delay time and angle between two halves of the laser pulse in a nonlinear crystal. We present the possibility of real-time measurement of the pulse duration, peak intensity (or energy), and the pointing jitters of a laser pulse, by analyzing the spatial profile of the SH autocorrelation signal measured by a CCD camera. The measurement of the shot-to-shot variation of those parameters will be important for the detailed characterization of laser accelerated electrons or protons.

Attosecond stable dispersion-free delay line for easy ultrafast metrology

“…Due to the grazing incidence of the input beam, the focus drifts away as one of the split mirrors is linearly displaced to control the delay, which limits the useful delay range to a few tens of fs. Moreover, in grazing incidence split-and-focusing mirrors, it is difficult to achieve spatio-temporal overlap of foci on the detector, which reduces the fringe contrast [22][23][24] . Moreover, such geometries have limited freedom to independently control intensity, polarization and spectrum of individual split wavefronts.…”