Abstract

Temporal pulse characterization is gaining increased attention as bit rates become higher and data pulses become shorter. For short pulses (in the 10 ps range), direct photodetection with high-speed detectors suffers from limited bandwidth. To circumvent this problem, non-linear optical sampling can be implemented via nonlinear cross-correlations of the data pulses with much shorter sampling pulses by sum-frequency generation or two-photon photocurrent. We demonstrate the significance of phase effects in non-linear sampling, particularly for real-time diagnostics.

© 2002 Optical Society of America