Detection of ultrafast thermal transients using a chirped, super-continuum white light pulse

Summary form only given. Ultrafast material transients are typically measured with a correlation technique that uses two ultrashort laser pulses and a delay line. The technique presented in this work encodes the temporal information onto the spectral components of a chirped and temporally stretched, super-continuum probe pulse. This preserves the information of the entire material transient onto a single probe pulse. The approach generalizes and improves on the single-shot, narrowband, chirped detection technique used by Z. Jiang and C. Zhang (1998). Other single shot techniques have been recently realized that separate a single probe pulse into a series of time-delayed probe pulses that are spatially separated onto a CCD device. The use of a continuous probe pulse such as the technique presented here offers several advantages including ease of configuring the time record length and temporal resolution while providing a degree of insensitivity to optical misalignment.