Kazunori TANIMURA, Tsuyoshi KONISHI, Kazuyoshi ITOH and Yoshiki ICHIOKA¹

Graduate School of Engineering, Osaka University, 2-1, Yamadaoka, Suita, Osaka 565-0871, Japan
¹Nara National College of Technology, 22, Yatamachi, Yamatokoriyama, Nara 639-1080, Japan

(Received April 11, 2002; Accepted January 15, 2003)

We demonstrate the retrieval of the amplitude and phase of an ultrashort optical pulse from an optical spectrogram obtained by optical spectrogram scope (OSS). OSS is an interferometric method of obtaining a single-shot optical spectrogram without nonlinear optical effects. Since the optical spectrogram obtained by OSS retains information on the amplitude and phase of a signal pulse, we can retrieve this information without an iterative inversion algorithm from the spectrogram. In our demonstration, we retrieved the quadratic variation of a spectral phase of a linear chirped ultrashort laser pulse from a mode-locked Ti:sapphire laser.

Key words: spectrogram, time-frequency analysis, phase retrieval, interferometric time-of-flight cross correlation