Frequency-to-Time Assisted interferometry for Full-Field Optical Waveform Measurements with Picosecond Resolution and Microsecond Record Lengths

This paper describes and demonstrates a full-field (amplitude and phase) optical waveform measurement technique which utilizes interferometry, frequency-to-time mapping, and four-quadrature coherent detection. This generalized frequency-to-time mapping technique and associated reconstruction algorithm does not need to satisfy the usual requirements for performing an optical Fourier transform (OFT) and, therefore it provides significant improvements in fidelity and record length compared to previous OFT-based methods. Different implementations of the method demonstrate polarization-diversified, real-time, single-shot measurements with optical bandwidths in excess of 560 GHz, signal powers as small as 25 µW, and extend record lengths to more than 3 µs. Complex waveforms with time-bandwidth products in excess of 1 million are measured.