Novel diagnostics for the characterization of ultrashort laser pulses

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The market for ultrafast lasers was representing a value of 4.21B US$ in 2019 and is expected to reach 16B$ by 2025. Since the market for ultrafast lasers is rapidly growing, diagnostics for their characterization will become equally important. Among them, spectrometers and devices capable to retrieve their pulse duration are absolutely essential. This can be easily understood by the fact that the temporal profile of laser pulses is defined by their spectra and spectral phase. To optimize and to get the shortest pulse duration, it is absolutely essential to have devices to measure the spectra and the spectral phase. While in the visible and near infrared spectral range many technologies for the diagnostics of ultrashort laser pulses exist and are available commercially, technologies are not widely available for the IR and mid-IR range. Over the recent years, INRS researchers with academic and industrial collaborators have developed two technologies for the diagnostics of IR and mid-IR ultrashort pulses. The first technology is a spectrometer based on multiphoton absorption and bears the potential to provide low cost devices for spectral characterization of IR lasers with improved sensitivity and spectral resolution compared to current technologies. This will be investigated closely with few-cycle Inc. The second technology, FROSt, is capable to characterize pulses from the visible to the mid-IR and is free of phase matching. Therefore, FROSt is ideal to characterize octave spanning laser pulses capable to produce single-cycle duration. For single-cycle pulses, another important parameter to define their temporal structure is their carrier envelope phase (CEP). INRS researchers have developed a third technology to characterize laser shot-to-shot fluctuations of the CEP. For the second and third technology, INRS researchers with support of both partners will push them to their limit by investigating the generation and characterization of single-cycle pulses and the tracking of CEP at high repetition rate. At the end of this project, our technologies will reach a much higher TRL (from 3 to 6) thus enabling their transfers to Canadian companies including our industrial partners.