SIMULTANEOUS RECOVERY OF 2 ULTRASHORT LASER-PULSES FROM A SINGLE SPECTROGRAM

We introduce a technique for simultaneously measuring the time-depende nt intensity and phase of two independent and arbitrary ultrashort las er pulses from a single measured spectrogram. This two-pulse method is mathematically equivalent to the problem of blind deconvolution, and we use an algorithm analogous to those used for deblurring two-dimensi onal images to recover the two pulses. We demonstrate the method by si multaneously retrieving the intensity and the phase of two different p ulses from a Ti:sapphire laser, one of which is chirped by propagation through glass. (C) 1995 Optical Society of America