Abstract
The measurement of transient optical fields has proven critical to understanding the dynamical mechanisms underlying ultrafast physical and chemical phenomena, and is key to realizing higher speeds in electronics and telecommunications. However, complete characterization of optical waveforms requires an ‘optical oscilloscope’ capable of resolving the electric-field oscillations with sub-femtosecond resolution and with single-shot operation. Here we show that strong-field nonlinear excitation of photocurrents in a silicon-based image sensor chip can provide the sub-cycle optical gate necessary to characterize carrier-envelope phase-stable optical waveforms in the mid-infrared. By mapping the temporal delay between an intense excitation and weak perturbing pulse onto a transverse spatial coordinate of the image sensor, we show that the technique allows single-shot measurement of few-cycle waveforms.
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The data that supports the plots within this paper and other findings of this study are available at https://stars.library.ucf.edu/cgi/preview.cgi?article=1001&context=datasets.
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The codes that produced the modelled data within this paper and other findings of this study are available at https://stars.library.ucf.edu/cgi/preview.cgi?article=1001&context=datasets.
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Acknowledgements
This material is based primarily on research supported by the Air Force Office of Scientific Research under award no. FA9550-20-1-0284. S.G.-M. was supported by the Army Research Office under award no. W911NF-19-1-0211. We thank Z. Chang for helpful discussions and for loaning the PbSe spectrometer used to measure the mid-infrared spectra.
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M.C. had the idea for the single-shot waveform measurement scheme and oversaw the research team. Y.L. led the experimental effort and performed most of the measurements and simulations. J.E.B. assisted with the measurements of the carrier-envelope phase dependence. J.N. and S.G.-M. assisted with the construction of the experimental set-up and with the data collection. All authors contributed to data analysis and the creation of the manuscript.
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Peer review information Nature Photonics thanks Nicholas Karpowicz, Gerhard Paulus and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.
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Supplementary Notes 1–5, Figs. 1–14 and Table 1.
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Liu, Y., Beetar, J.E., Nesper, J. et al. Single-shot measurement of few-cycle optical waveforms on a chip. Nat. Photon. 16, 109–112 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-021-00924-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41566-021-00924-6
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