Interferometric method for the complete characterization of highly chirped ultrabroadband pulses

This article describes an interferometric method, called “Chirped Heterodyne Interferometry for Measuring Pulses” (CHIMP), for the complete characterization of highly (monotonically) chirped ultrabroadband optical pulses. CHIMP provides the spectrally dependent group delay dispersion (GDD) of the a chirped test pulse (CTP) via a simple direct algorithm and is verified via second harmonic generation (SHG) simulations and experimental measurements of pulses centred at 800nm with a bandwidth of 55nm stretched to 32ps at the 1% intensity level, corresponding to a time-bandwidth product of 830.