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Femtosecond Waveform Processing via Spectral Holography

A.M. Weiner

Although the technology of generating femtosecond optical pulses is now rather advanced, our ability to manipulate or process ultrashort pulses is still limited. Techniques for accomplishing linear filtering of ultrashort pulses have been developed and have been used to precisely synthesize femtosecond pulse waveforms. Nevertheless, certain basic signal processing operations, such as time reversal, correlation, and convolution, cannot be achieved by linear filtering. In this summary, we describe the use of holographic processing techniques to perform nonlinear filtering of femtosecond waveforms.