Ultrafast single-shot imaging of femtosecond pulse propagation in transparent liquids using a supercontinuum and optical polarigraphy

Abstract

We investigated the ultrafast time-resolved single-shot imaging of femtosecond pulse propagation using a supercontinuum and optical polarigraphy in transparent liquids. The probe supercontinuum senses the instantaneous birefringence induced by the laser pulse, and a polarigraphy image with different color distributions could be obtained. By comparing the wavelength distributions and the saturation variation of the images, the recorded polarigraphy images in two samples with different response time were analyzed. In the fast response sample, N-methyl-2-pyrrolidone (NMP), the spectral widths and the saturation values of the polarigraphy image at fixed positions were narrower and higher than those in CS 2. Due to the slow response of CS 2 , the probe light sensed a long-lived birefringence and the polarigraphy image contained more wavelength components at every position along the pump pulse propagation direction.

Single-shot pump-probe technique by the combination of an echelon and a grating with a time window of 109 ps

“…In general, the single-shot pump-probe technique encodes the time delay into a single probe pulse using spatial or spectral strategies. Currently, the commonly used encoding strategies include the angle beam encoding strategy [1,2,[6][7][8], spectral encoding strategy [9][10][11][12], and echelon encoding strategy [3,5,[13][14][15][16]. The angle beam encoding strategy utilizes the crossed line focus of the pump beam and probe beam on the sample plane, and the time delay is encoded along the focal line.…”

Tight focusing induces pulse delay and pulse compression of double-ring-shaped radially polarized ultrashort light pulses

“…In addition, J 0 and J 1 are the first kind of Bessel functions of order zero and order one, respectively. By Fourier transformation, the total electric field of the ultrashort light pulse near the focus can be obtained by superposition of each spectral component as [21]:…”

“…Study of double-ring-shaped radially polarized light beams in tight focusing has shown that near the focus of the high-NA objective, the longitudinal component varied with the degree of truncation of the incident beam by the pupil of the objective lens because of the interference between the longitudinal components of the inner and outer rings [18]. Meanwhile, ultrashort light pulses that have temporal resolution down to the femtosecond range have recently been used in several time-resolved optical measurements [10,[19][20][21]. In optical measurements with a femtosecond light pulse, the spatial and temporal properties of the focused ultrashort light pulse may influence the resolution of a produced image [22].…”