| Ultrafast optical pulses are an increasingly important tool for many experiments and applications, from basic physics and chemistry to medicine and micromachining. The ability to measure these pulses has allowed researchers to perform new and exciting experiments, and the advent of faster and more reliable measurement devices should enable the transition of ultrafast laser technology from the scientific to the commercial arena. Since ultrafast optical pulses are faster than the fastest electronic detection devices, they present a considerable challenge for measurement. This thesis addresses these challenges, and presents novel techniques for measuring ultrafast optical pulses, both in the classical and quantum regimes.;There are three general classes of ultrafast pulse measurement techniques---spectrography, tomography, and interferometry. We review the spectrographic and tomographic techniques, and analyze four interferometric techniques. We show that, in general, the interferometric methods offer the simplest and most direct approach for measuring ultrashort pulses.;One interferometric technique in particular, spectral shearing interferometry (SSI), stands out as a potentially ideal measurement solution. Yet, prior to this work, SSI had not been implemented. We demonstrate a novel SSI device which uses nonlinear frequency mixing to generate the required spectral shear. We use the method, referred to as spectral phase interferometry for direct electric-field reconstruction (SPIDER), to measure pulses from a modelocked Ti:Sapphire oscillator and to measure second harmonic pulses from an amplified Ti:Sapphire system.;The principles of SPIDER can also be applied to the measurement of spatially localized fields. To test the analogies, we built a spatial-domain version of SPIDER and measured the statistics of fields with arbitrary spatial coherence. To our knowledge, our spatial shearing device is the first interferometric technique able to measure the two-point correlation function of space-shift-variant fields.;The general pulse measurement techniques can also be adapted to quantum field characterization. By combining spectrographic concepts with the interferometric implementation, we devised a technique for measuring weak (quantum) fields with ultrafast temporal resolution. A complete analysis shows that our proposed device, multimode temporal heterodyne detection (MTHD), measures the multi-temporal mode Q-function describing the statistics or repetitive quantum pulses. |
