Measuring pulse-front tilt in ultrashort pulses using GRENOUILLE

We show that the spatio-temporal distortion, pulse-front tilt, is naturally, easily, and sensitively measured by the recently demonstrated, extremely simple variation of single-shot second-harmonic generation frequency-resolved optical gating (SHG FROG): GRENOUILLE. While GRENOUILLE traces are ordinarily centered on the zero of delay, a pulse with pulse-front tilt yields a trace whose center is shifted to a nonzero delay that is proportional to the pulse-front tilt. As a result, the trace-center shift reveals both the magnitude and sign of the pulse-front tilt-independent of the temporal pulse intensity and phase. The effects of pulse-front tilt can then easily be removed from the trace and the intensity and phase vs. time also retrieved, yielding a full description of the pulse in space and time. (C) 2003 Optical Society of America