Mirrorless single-shot tilted-pulse-front autocorrelator

Ultrashort pulses exhibiting angular dispersion have their pulse front tilted relative to the phase front. This leads to a serious degradation in the focused peak power, making the use of adequate diagnostics indispensable. Here we present an upgrade to a previously demonstrated uniaxial single-shot autocorrelator for ultrashort laser pulse-width measurements that extends its versatility, by making it suitable for detecting and correcting tilted pulse fronts. We have used this diagnostic to optimize the alignment of our chirped-pulse-amplification grating compressor. (c) 2005 Optical Society of America