1. Measuring spatio-temporal couplings using modal spatio-spectral wavefront retrieval
- Author
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Weisse, N, Esslinger, J, Howard, S, Foerster, FM, Haberstroh, F, Doyle, L, Norreys, P, Schreiber, J, Karsch, S, and Döpp, A
- Subjects
FOS: Physical sciences ,Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics ,Optics (physics.optics) ,Physics - Optics - Abstract
Knowledge of spatio-temporal couplings such as pulse-front tilt or curvature is important to determine the focused intensity of high-power lasers. Common techniques to diagnose these couplings are either qualitative or require hundreds of measurements. Here we present both a new algorithm for retrieving spatio-temporal couplings, as well as novel experimental implementations. Our method is based on the expression of the spatio-spectral phase in terms of a Zernike-Taylor basis, allowing us to directly quantify the coefficients for common spatio-temporal couplings. We take advantage of this method to perform quantitative measurements using a simple experimental setup, consisting of different bandpass filters in front of a Shack-Hartmann wavefront sensor. This fast acquisition of laser couplings using narrowband filters, abbreviated FALCON, is easy and cheap to implement in existing facilities. To this end, we present a measurement of spatio-temporal couplings at the ATLAS-3000 petawatt laser using our technique.
- Published
- 2023