Generation of high-energy clean multicolored ultrashort pulses and their application in single-shot temporal contrast measurement.

We demonstrate the generation of 100-μJ-level multicolored femtosecond pulses based on a single-stage cascaded four-wave mixing (CFWM) process in a thin glass plate by using cylinder lenses. The generated high-energy CFWM signals can shift the central wavelength and have well-enhanced temporal contrast because of the third-order nonlinear process. They are innovatively used as clean sampling pulses of a cross-correlator for single-shot temporal contrast measurement. With a simple homemade setup, the proof-of-principle experimental results demonstrate the single-shot cross-correlator with dynamic range of 10, temporal resolution of about 160 fs and temporal window of 50 ps. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first demonstration in which both the dynamic range and the temporal resolution of a single-shot temporal contrast measurement are comparable to those of a commercial delay-scanning cross-correlator.