Measurement of femtosecond pulse contrast of low-repetition-rate lasers by optical Kerr effect

Abstract

In this paper, pulse contrast was measured for femtosecond lasers with low-repetition-rate (40 Hz) using optical Kerr gate as a sampler. The results show that, without attenuator, dynamic range as high as 104 was achieved, with a scanning range of 126 ps and a temporal sampling interval of 6.3 fs. Moreover, the method suits for measuring laser pulse contrast in wide spectrum range.