Single‐Shot Temporal Vector Field Reconstruction of Ultrafast Pulses

ABSTRACT

Single‐shot vector field measurements of ultrafast lasers leverage advances in topological photonics, attosecond science, high‐field physics, laser‐matter interactions, and quantum information processing. However, the reconstruction of the vector electric field (including amplitude, phase, and polarization) of a single laser pulse has remained scientifically challengeable due to limits of the electrical bandwidth. Here, we present a single‐shot method to reconstruct the temporal vector field of ultrafast pulses. It uses a parallel measurement scheme that combines coherent detection and high‐speed spectropolarimetry. The coherent receiver extracts the temporal amplitude and phase by inverting the dispersive time‑stretching signal, while the spectropolarimeter provides the relative phase difference. The two sets of data are processed together to reconstruct the full vectorial evolution. We demonstrate the capability by measuring the full field of dissipative solitons and breathers. This reveals intrinsic shot‑to‑shot vector dynamics that are hidden from conventional methods. Moreover, numerical simulations based on the vector Ginzburg‐Landau equation provide strong support for the experimental observations. Our method thus enables single‐shot tracking of the transient temporal evolution of non‐reproducible ultrafast pulses with a time resolution of 0.66 ps, offering an effective tool for frontier researches of ultrafast lasers and expected to benefit various applications of ultrafast lasers.