Diagnosing the waveform of an ultrashort optical pulse by collinear interferometry

Abstract During the high-harmonic generation (HHG) process, information about field interaction with the medium is imprinted in the extreme ultraviolet (XUV) radiation. Here, we present a method for using HHG to diagnose the electric field of an optical pulse under a collinear geometry. When mixing a weak signal pulse with a strong driving pulse collinearly, the far field divergence of the XUV HHG is sensitive to the relative delay between the two pulses, which can be used as an ultrafast subcycle gate to reconstruct the electric field of the signal pulse. This collinear configuration is efficient, easy to operate and avoids artificial high order frequency components in reconstruction as compared to non-collinear schemes.