Spectral phase measurement and compensation of femtosecond laser pulse based on multi-photon intra-pulse interference phase scan

Abstract

In this paper, we develop a system that can be used to measure and compensate spectral phase of femtosecond laser pulses based on the multi-photon intra-pulse interference phase scan (MIIPS). In the system, a liquid crystal spatial light modulator (LC-SLM) is used to impose phase scan on the femtosecond laser pulse, while a spectrometer is used to record the MIIPS trace. Both the LC-SLM and the spectrometer are driven by home-developed LabVIEW programs. By analyzing the MIIPS trace, we obtain the spectral phase of the pre-chirped femtosecond laser pulse with only 3-times iteration. The femtosecond laser pulse is centered at 810 nm and has a repetition of 1 kHz. The accuracy of our measurement is less than ±0.1 rad. The measured phases are compensated by the LC-SLM, then we obtain a femtosecond laser pulse which is almost in the transform limit state. The device will be useful in many fields, for example, multi-photon microscopy, pulse shaping, and femtosecond laser spectroscopy etc.