Recent surprises in ultrashort-aaser-pulse measurement

Rick Trebino (Georgia Tech.)

Surprisingly, most recently developed pulse-measurement techniques measure only the coherent artifact, and so cannot distinguish trains of short, simple, stable pulses from long, complex, unstable ones. Equally surprising, it is now very easy to make complete single-shot measurements of supercontinuum pulses vs. time and arbitrary laser pulses vs. space (x,y) and time.