High-speed compressed sensing measurement using spectrally-encoded ultrafast laser pulses

We present a chirp processing technique for encoding pseudorandom patterns onto the spectra of broadband optical pulses for compressed sensing (CS) measurement. We demonstrate applications to characterization of ultrawideband sparse radio frequency (RF) signals and to very high-speed continuous microscopic flow imaging. In both domains, the optical sampling technique permits accurate recovery of the signals under test from only a few percent of the measurements required for conventional Nyquist sampling, significantly relaxing the required analog-to-digital conversion bandwidth and amount of data storage.