FEMTOSECOND SPECTRAL HOLOGRAPHY

Storage, recall, and processing of shaped femtosecond waveforms are achieved by performing spectral holography within a femtosecond pulse shaping apparatus. Time reversal, as well as correlation and convolution, of femtosecond temporal signals are demonstrated. Applications of this technique to matched filtering, dispersion compensation, encryption and decoding, and femtosecond waveform synthesis are also discussed. Our work extends the powerful principles of holographic signal processing, which have been used extensively for pattern recognition and filtering of two-dimensional spatial signals, to the femtosecond time domain.