Real-time inversion of polarization gate frequency-resolved optical gating spectrograms.

Frequency-resolved optical gating (FROG) is a technique used to measure the intensity and phase of ultrashort laser pulses through the optical construction of a spectrogram of the pulse. To obtain quantitative information about the pulse from its spectrogram, an iterative two-dimensional phase retrieval algorithm must be used. Current algorithms are quite robust but retrieval of all the pulse information can be slow. Previous real-time FROG trace inversion work focused on second-harmonic-generation FROG, which has an ambiguity in the direction of time, and required digital signal processors (DSPs). We develop a simplified real-time FROG device based on a single-shot geometry that no longer requires DSPs. We use it and apply the principal component generalized projections algorithm to invert polarization gate FROG traces at rates as high as 20 Hz.