SPIDER: A decade of measuring ultrashort pulses

It was ten years ago in Rochester, New York that the first SPIDER was built. This simple acronym belies the subtleties of its inner workings; Spectral Phase Interferometry for Direct Electric-field Reconstruction (the f in field conveniently missed the cut) is a device that measures ultrashort pulses, utilizing spectral shearing interferometry and directly recovering the spectral phase. The very first SPIDER apparatus occupied nearly half an optical table, used a scanning monochromator, and had no computerized inversion routine. In the intervening decade, SPIDER has grown up. It has found a strong foothold in ultrafast laboratories throughout the world. Multiple groups have found useful new applications with this vital measurement tool, while others have contributed to the improvement of SPIDER itself, reaching to ever shorter pulses, new wavelength regimes, and making devices more sensitive, robust, smaller and faster. It also adapts to a field of research that changes rapidly. It was first designed to track and quantify the remaining spectral phase in a pulse to perfect its compression. In ten years, with the advent of pulse shapers, the real benefits of field diagnostics are becoming apparent. We have shifted away from the race towards the shortest IR pulse to a wide use of complex shaped pulses in almost every spectral range from far IR to XUV. But the quest of the shortest pulse is not over and new compression techniques utilize really broad spectra that are highly structured. All these applications provide new challenges for characterization techniques.