Simultaneous recovery of two ultrashort laser pulses from a single spectrogram

We introduce a technique for simultaneously measuring the time-dependent intensity and phase of two independent and arbitrary ultrashort laser pulses from a single measured spectrogram. This two-pulse method is mathematically equivalent to the problem of blind deconvolution, and we use an algorithm analogous to those used for deblurring two-dimensional images to recover the two pulses. We demonstrate the method by simultaneously retrieving the intensity and the phase of two different pulses from a Ti:sapphire laser, one of which is chirped by propagation through glass. (C) 1995 Optical Society of America