A-Swing Ptychographic Retrieval of Scalar and Vector Ultrashort Pulses

The scientific and industrial interest in ultrafast pulsed lasers has been continuously increasing since the laser invention. In this context, the temporal characterization of these ultrashort events plays a key role. The amplitude swing (a-swing) technique [1] is a very robust and versatile tool for this purpose [2] with a remarkably simple and compact inline setup. It can be implemented a complex amplitude modulation by using an alternative setup (called generalizing) [3], maintaining the advantages of the conventional version. Recently, it has proved to measure few-cycle pulses [4] and vector pulses [5] (i.e., with time-varying polarization) from a single a-swing trace, using the conventional setup. Regarding the pulse reconstruction, Levenberg-Marquardt [1], [2] and differential evolution algorithms [6] have been used. In this work, we implement a ptychographic iterative engine (PIE) algorithm, valid both for scalar and vector pulses, measured applying any kind of amplitude modulation (conventional [1] and generalizing [3]).