Single shot amplitude and phase characterization of optical arbitrary waveforms

Using a time-gated dual quadrature spectral interferometry technique, for the first time we demonstrate single-shot characterization of both spectral amplitude and phase of similar to 1THz bandwidth optical arbitrary waveforms generated from a 10 GHz frequency comb. Our measurements provide a temporal resolution of 1ps over a record length of 100ps. Single-shot characterization becomes particularly relevant when waveform synthesis operations are updated at the repetition rate of the comb allowing creation of potentially infinite record length waveforms. We first demonstrate unambiguous single shot retrieval using rapidly updating waveforms. We then perform additional single-shot measurements of static user-defined waveforms generated via line-by-line pulse shaping. (C) 2009 Optical Society of America