Abstract
Integration of optical frequency comb and spectral line-by-line pulse shaping can generate optical arbitrary waveform (OAW) with ultrafast evolution of amplitude and phase spanning up to the entire repetition period (100% duty cycle). By independently controlling the electric fields at two orthogonal polarizations, one could generalize the OAW to vectorial OAW (V-OAW) with time-varying state of polarization (SOP). This is supposed the optical field of extreme complexity in the time/frequency domain, and is expected to have unique applications in ultrafast plasmonics. However, the requirement of creating two isolated pulse replicas in conventional ultrashort pulse measurement techniques, such as frequency-resolved optical gating (FROG), spectral phase interferometry for direct electric-field reconstruction (SPIDER), or tomographic ultrafast retrieval of transverse light E-fields (TURTLE) prevents them from being useful in OAW or V-OAW measurement. A limited number of measurement techniques are OAW or V-OAW compatible but subject to the requirements of a synchronized well-characterized optical reference, a synchronized radio-frequency (RF) reference, high-speed electronics, or large data redundancy and iterative algorithm. The usefulness of these methods could be compromised when the required optical or RF reference is unavailable, the system does not have interferometric stability, or the frequency comb spacing is larger than the attainable electronic bandwidth (e.g. 100 GHz). In this dissertation, we proposed and experimentally demonstrated a couple of methods that can characterize as well as synthesize OAW or V-OAW without measurement ambiguity or requirements of interferometric stability, high-speed electronics, or iterative data inversion. The transform-limited pulse duration is 2.5 ps for the used comb source. They can be applied to attosecond extreme ultraviolet (EUV) pulse measurement and intensity repetition rate multiplication of a scalar or vectorial pulse train via temporal Talbot effect.