Uniaxial single shot autocorrelator

An optical pulse autocorrelator for single or multiple pulses is described that has the novel feature of being essentially uniaxial and offers a number of distinct benefits over traditional designs. The uniaxial nature of the device, coupled with a small number of degrees of freedom means that there is an inherent simplicity of alignment. A fixed and equal group delay in each arm guarantees the necessary temporal overlap of the optical pulses. Calibration is fixed and easily determined and it is extremely compact and transportable. We have verified its performance over three time ranges and have demonstrated that it is capable of measuring pulse lengths ranging from 100 fs to tens of picoseconds. (C) 1999 American Institute of Physics. [S0034-6748(99)04803-0].