Generation of pulse trains with nonconventional temporal correlation properties

Abstract

We apply time dependent spectral phase modulation to generate pulse trains that are spectrally and temporally partially coherent in an ensemble averaged sense. We consider, in particular, quadratic spectral phase modulation of Gaussian pulses, and demonstrate two particular types of nonuniformly correlated pulse trains. The controlled partial temporal coherence of the nonstationary fields is generated using a pulse compressor and experimentally verified with frequency resolved optical gating (FROG). We show that the correlation characteristics of such pulse trains can be retrieved directly from the FROG spectrograms provided one has certain a priori knowledge of the pulse train. Our results open a pathway for experimental confirmation of several correlation induced effects in the temporal domain.