As the repetition rates of high-intensity, ultrashort laser systems increase, diagnostics with matching data collection speeds must be developed. We have previously developed a spatiotemporal laser diagnostic, STRIPED FISH, which measures the complete laser electric field on a single shot. To provide rapid feedback, we now introduce a high-repetition-rate compatible adaptation of the STRIPED FISH retrieval algorithm which condenses the key electric field quantities into a handful of scalars for rapid assessment of the pulse’s first-order spatiotemporal distortions, and we validate this novel retrieval method with an experimental data trace.

We report numerical and experimental studies of instabilities in a “noise-like pulse” dissipative soliton laser generating an output spectrum of 1000 nm bandwidth, and with two orders of magnitude variation in intracavity spectral width over one roundtrip. Simulations identify the origin of the laser instability as the sensitivity to noise of nonlinear soliton dynamics. Our experiments use real-time time and frequency domain measurements, and our simulations reproduce quantitatively both the full extent of intracavity supercontinuum broadening, as well as the probability distributions of temporal and spectral fluctuations, including rogue waves.

Stable arrangements of temporal solitons are reported for essentially every implementation of femtosecond fiber lasers. Their formation can be tracked with today’s real-time instrumentation. However, the underlying interaction mechanism frequently remained elusive and predictions of soliton separations in actual sources are often missing. Here, we present the experimental analysis of bound-state trajectories in a femtosecond Er:fiber laser and reveal the underlying universal coupling mechanism. We demonstrate all-electronic switching between two stable soliton molecules and the feasibility of tuning bound-state separations. The results are applicable to various ultrafast sources and may readily be adapted for generating femtosecond pulse pairs in spectroscopy and material processing.

We present a method for acquiring a sequence of time-resolved images in a single shot, termed Single-Shot Non-Synchronous Array Photography (SNAP). In SNAP, a diffractive optical element is used to create an array of angled probe beams. Each of these sub-pulses then transmit through an echelon to impart unique time delays, creating an angled pulse train. After probing a scene, the sub-pulses can be differentiated with techniques from light field microscopy. Temporal resolution in SNAP is fundamentally limited only by the probe pulse duration. We demonstrate SNAP by capturing the evolution of a laser initiated plasma at an average framerate of 4.2 Tfps.

We present a method to capture in real-time the full-field of broadband complex optical pulses such as soliton fission induced by noise-seeded modulation instability. The proposed real-time measurement technique is based on Fourier Transform spectral interferometry using as reference a broadband pulse. A stretched phase-stable reference field generated via self-phase modulation is combined with the test field and the resulting spectral interference is measured in real-time with high dynamic range. The full field is then reconstructed from post-processing with 20 fs resolution and over a time window of 20 ps. Experimental results are in very good agreement with numerical simulations.