| Over the past several decades ultrafast laser science and technology has evolved into an extensive and diverse yet still one of the most rapidly growing and developing areas of optics. This evolution has been one of mutual interdependence. Each current generation of technological innovations not only solves the specific problems it was designed for, but uncovers new application opportunities and enables the exploration of new basic research areas. In turn, these new challenges will give rise to the next generation of technological improvements born of the currently existing technologies and the advances in fundamental scientific knowledge and understanding. Ultrashort pulse characterization has always been an essential part of this ultrafast optics evolution. The thesis makes yet another contribution to it by describing the principle, design, construction, development and operation of a novel interferometric ultrashort pulse characterization device. It consists of a new implementation of spectral-shearing interferometry for reconstructing the electric field of ultrashort pulses, requiring only a single optical element to encode the temporal field of the pulse under test. The technique relies on an asymmetric group velocity matching type II sum frequency generation process in a single long nonlinear crystal. We analyze the performance of the device for a wide range of experimentally available input pulse parameters. The device --- potential building block for the future generations of ultrashort diagnostics --- proves a practical, elegant, compact, robust, and sensitive option for complete amplitude and phase ultrashort pulse characterization. As the femtosecond systems of increasingly larger bandwidth become a widespread reality, the detrimental effects of dispersion require careful consideration. Dispersive pulse distortion degrades longitudinal resolution of broadband interferometric imaging methods such as optical coherence tomography and low-coherence interferometry. We address the issue with a novel signal processing dispersion compensation method. This numerical technique improves the axial resolution without a priori knowledge of the material dispersive properties of the sample under consideration. The dispersion compensation is based on the generalized temporal fourth order field autoconvolution function computed from the readily available experimental interferometric scans and has an intuitive depiction in the time-frequency phase-space via the Wigner distribution function formalism. |
