C. Dorrer and I. A. Walmsley Vol. 19, No. 5 / May 2002 / J. Opt. Soc. Am.

B 1019

Accuracy criterion for ultrashort pulse

characterization techniques:
application to spectral
phase interferometry for
direct electric field reconstruction

Christophe Dorrer and Ian A. Walmsley

The Institute of Optics, University of Rochester, Rochester, New York 14627

Received March 13, 2001; revised manuscript received October 15, 2001
We propose a procedure for the comparison of two ultrashort optical pulses based on the root-mean-square field
error. This procedure supplies a practical criterion that allows one to test the accuracy of pulse characteriza-
tion techniques. We apply this procedure to spectral phase interferometry for direct electric field reconstruc-
tion (SPIDER), a method that uses shearing interferometry in the frequency domain to measure ultrashort
light pulses. Two novel reconstruction algorithms are described in detail, one based on the reconstruction of
the spectral phase by concatenation, the other by integration. The range of validity of these algorithms and
the influence of noise on the accuracy of the reconstruction are studied using the proposed criterion. 2002
Optical Society of America
OCIS codes: 120.3180, 120.5050, 320.7100.

1. INTRODUCTION sible experimental artifacts. The field is then retrieved

The electric field is a fundamental entity in optics. A
number of methods are known for measuring it, or a
closely related quantity, such as the coherence function.1
Most recently, attention has been paid to the character-
ization of the field of ultrashort pulses, in its most general
form a function of both temporal and spatial coordinates.
The knowledge of the field is important in a wide variety
of scientific and technological applications, and this has
lent increasing importance to metrology.
The main difficulty in determining the optical field is
that most optical detectors are absorptive, and such
square-law detectors are not sensitive to the phase of the
optical wave. Therefore indirect techniques must be
used for the characterization of the electric field of ul-
trashort optical pulses. Several methods have been pro-
posed and demonstrated. These methods may be classi-
fied according to their experimental implementation and
the nature of the experimental trace, as well as the algo-
rithms used to extract the electric field from the experi-
mental data.2 In all methods the quantity of interest is
the electric field of the pulse as a function of the optical
frequency or time.
The accuracy of these measurement methods is of ut-
most importance. It is critical in many applications that
the reconstruction of the physical quantity from the mea-
sured quantity matches well the actual physical quantity
from which the measured data were derived. This is
clearly a theoretical task, relying on simulations or equa-
tions, because the actual field is unknown before a mea-
surement has been made. Therefore we adopt the usual
procedure: One first simulates an experimental trace
corresponding to a test field, including simulations of pos-
by use of the algorithms that would be used under experi-
mental conditions. The difference between the test field
and the retrieved field is then evaluated according to a
chosen criterion. Accuracy criteria are useful for the
comparison of different techniques aimed at reconstruct-
ing the same quantity and also for determining the range
of working parameters for the successful operation of a
given technique.
The definition of such a criterion is somewhat subjec-
tive, and many different accuracy measures have been
used, most of them adopted from the field of image
reconstruction.3 It seems reasonable to base a test of ac-
curacy on the retrieved quantity itself, rather than some
functional of this quantity. Nonetheless, one might
choose to emphasize the importance of the reconstruction
of some features of the field by using a weighting function
that gives more weight to these features.
In this paper, we use the root-mean-square (RMS) field
error to compare the fields of two ultrashort optical
pulses. This enables us to test the accuracy of any pulse
characterization technique by quantifying the difference
between a synthetic test pulse that is used to test the re-
construction and the reconstructed pulse itself. Al-
though this is a simple way of comparing two continuous
functions and is widely used in the domain of image re-
construction (and more generally in mathematics, where
it is known as the Euclidian distance), to our knowledge
little attention has been paid to it in the context of ul-
trashort pulses. Other studies have relied on more com-
plicated functions.4,5
The RMS measure provides a natural test of accuracy
that is commensurate with the aim of current methods of

0740-3224/2002/051019-11$15.00 2002 Optical Society of America

1020 J. Opt. Soc. Am. B / Vol. 19, No. 5 / May 2002 C. Dorrer and I. A. Walmsley

pulse characterization: reconstruction of the electric lytic signal is usually decomposed as E(t) E(t)
field. The RMS error is, of course, sensitive to both the expi (t) 0t 0. Conversely, in the spectral
intensity and the phase of the reconstructed field, and of- domain the analytic signal is decomposed as E( )
fers a naturally weighted balance between these entities. E( ) expi () t0 0, where t 0 is the delay re-
Moreover, it can be calculated in the time or frequency do- garding a chosen time origin and 0 is the absolute phase.
main and gives the same result in either.
I( ) E( ) 2 is the spectral density, () is the spectral
The paper is organized as follows. We first give gen-
phase, I(t) E(t) 2 is the instantaneous power, and (t)
eral definitions and properties of the RMS error as it re-
is the temporal phase.
lates to the characterization of ultrashort optical pulses.
The RMS field error between two fields E 1 and E 2 is
We also demonstrate its equivalence to the Wigner error,5
defined as the norm of the difference E 1 E 2 :
a more complicated and less computationally efficient cri-
terion. The RMS field error is then applied to studying
the accuracy of pulse reconstruction by spectral phase in-
terferometry for direct electric field reconstruction68
E 1 E 2

dt E 1 t E 2 t 2 1/2

(SPIDER). Two algorithms for the reconstruction of the

pulse shape from the SPIDER experimental data are pre-
sented and discussed, one based on integration tech-
1
2

d E 1 E 2 2 1/2
. (6)

niques, the other based on the reconstruction of multiple
sets of the electric field sampled according to the Shannon
theorem. The error measure is used to quantify the ac-
curacy of SPIDER under simulated experimental condi-
tions and for various parameters with these algorithms.
In a companion paper tests of consistency and precision
will be presented for SPIDER.9 We emphasize that the
procedures outlined in these two papers have wider appli-
cation than the specific example we have chosen. They
can be applied equally well to other methods of pulse
measurement.
2. RECONSTRUCTION OF THE ELECTRIC
FIELD AND THE RMS FIELD ERROR
A. General Definitions
The real electric field E(t) of a short optical pulse can be
decomposed into its complex analytic signal E(t) by use of
the following relations:
As a consequence of Parsevals theorem, the fidelities of
reconstruction of a pulse in the temporal or the spectral
domain are equivalent, according to this measure.
B. Properties
For any pair of normalized fields, ranges between 0 (sig-
nifying that the two fields are equal) and 2 (signifying
that they are inversions of each other). Let us consider a
physical field E and a measured field E . Ideally, E is
equal to E, but because of the limitations of the measure-
ment technique itself or experimental imperfections,
these fields might differ. The influence of differences be-
tween E and E can be studied by writing the fields in
terms of their amplitudes and phases:
E E exp i
E E exp i ,
(7)

E

dtE t exp i t , (1)
where E( ) and () are small variations of the spec-
tral amplitude and phase of the field. Expanding the
field to first order in these small quantities gives

E t
2
1
0

d E exp i t . E E E

(2) i E exp i . (8)

This temporal representation is related to a frequency The error function can then be calculated directly as

representation by a Fourier transform:
1/2
1
E

dtE t exp i t , (3)

2
d E 2 2 E 2

E 2 E 2 1/2. (9)
and vice versa;

thus depends on the variation of the amplitude differ-
1
E t d E exp i t . (4) ence E and the variation of the phase difference
2 weighted by the spectral density E . The weighting
of the phase difference at frequency by the spectral den-
Either of the representations E or E completely describe
sity at that frequency has a simple physical interpreta-
the pulse. The norm E can be calculated in both do-
mains by use of Parsevals theorem: tion: E( ) 2 is the energy at frequency . The phase
takes an arbitrary value when the spectral density is

E2

dt E t 2
1
2


d E 2 . (5)
zero, so this weighting ensures that large variations of
the phase difference near do not significantly affect the
reconstructed pulse shape. (Experimentally, a low
With the reference (carrier) frequency 0 and the signal-to-noise ratio is expected where the spectral den-
carrier-envelope phase offset (CEO) 0 the temporal ana- sity is low.) This is why all error measures that give use-
C. Dorrer and I. A. Walmsley
ful results use a function of the phase weighted by the
intensity.4 The spectral density appears naturally here
as the weighting function.10 An identical argument can
be made for the time domain.
In our simulations we consider that values of below
0.02 correspond to very good reconstructions, accuracies
between 0.02 and 0.1 correspond to average reconstruc-
tions, and accuracies above 0.1 correspond to poor recon-
structions. Such values are calculated for E E
1. We recognize that this choice of delineation is sub-
jective, however.
Most pulse characterization techniques do not measure
the time delay t 0 and the CEO phase 0 that appear in
the spectral domain representation of the field. Mea-
surement of these quantities is meaningful only if a ref-
erence time is available in the experiment. In the case of
the time delay, this might be provided, for example, by an-
other short pulse. Measurement of the second quantity
requires different approaches from the well-established
pulse characterization techniques, and new techniques
have only recently been proposed.11,12 The RMS error
depends, however, on these two quantities, and can be
used to compare directly only the full analytic signals of
two pulses. In most experimental cases, however, these
two quantities are indeterminate, and one wishes to mini-
mize without regard to their value. An identical con-
sideration exists in image reconstruction, as the piston
(constant phase term) and tilt (linear phase term) be-
tween two wavefronts are usually arbitrary or irrelevant
to the information content of an image.13 The RMS error
function makes this minimization quick and simple, as is
demonstrated in Appendix A.
C. Equivalence With Other Error Functions
1. Temporal Phase and Intensity Error Functions
One criterion used to test the accuracy of the frequency-
resolved optical gating technique,4 and later applied to
SPIDER,14 relies on a temporal intensity error function I
and a temporal phase error function , defined as
1/2
I dt I t I t 2 ,
1/2
dt t t 2 I 2 t dtI 2 t
These criteria weight the phase difference between the
two fields by the square of the temporal intensity. Al-
though this emphasizes the phase differences at times
when the corresponding intensity is large, there is no
simple connection to similar errors defined in the fre-
quency domain. (We note, however, that because of the
Parseval theorem two fields with nearly identical tempo-
ral phase and intensity will have nearly identical spectral
phase and intensity.)
2. Wigner Error
The Wigner distribution, widely used in quantum me-
chanics and signal processing, has been applied to the
Vol. 19, No. 5 / May 2002 / J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 1021
representation of ultrashort pulses (Ref. 15 and refer-
ences therein). It is defined in terms of the analytic sig-
nal as
W t,
dt E t
t
2
E* t
t
2
exp i t dt
1
2
d E
2
E *
2
exp i t d . (12)
This two-dimensional real distribution is attractive for
representation purposes, since it provides some intuition
about ill-defined but appealing notions such as instanta-
neous frequency or group delay. The Wigner distribution
has recently been used as a test of the resemblance of two
electric fields and as a test of accuracy of pulse character-
ization techniques.3 We show in Appendix B that this ap-
proach is equivalent to the approach presented here, since
the Wigner error can be derived from the RMS field error,
so that the intensive work associated with direct calcula-
tion of the Wigner error is not required. Similar conclu-
sions can be drawn for error measures involving the two-
time correlation function and the ambiguity function.
3. TEST OF SPECTRAL PHASE
INTERFEROMETRY FOR DIRECT
ELECTRIC-FIELD RECONSTRUCTION
A. SPIDER
SPIDER is a technique for the characterization of the
electric field of ultrashort optical pulses based on shear-
ing interferometry in the frequency domain. It relies on
interference between two frequency-sheared replicas of
the field. The shear is obtained by nonlinear frequency
conversion of two replicas of the pulse, delayed in time by
, with a chirped pulse. We consider here an ideal situa-
tion in which the nonlinear conversion is performed for
each replica with a perfectly monochromatic frequency, 0
(10) and 0 , in a nonlinear crystal with infinite band-
width. Practical limitations on the validity of these as-
sumptions were studied previously.3,8
1/2 We consider in our simulations that the spectrometer
. used to measure the interferogram has a flat temporal re-
sponse. The primary effect of finite spectral resolution
(11) and pixellation of the detector is to decrease the contrast
of the fringes, thus reducing the signal-to-noise ratio.16
The phase difference between the two electric fields, (
0 ) ( 0 ) , is extracted from the in-
terferogram by Fourier transform spectral inter-
ferometry.17 The interferogram is directly transformed
without any interpolation using a fast Fourier transform.
It is then filtered and Fourier transformed back.16 The
removal of the linear phase term is performed by use of
an error-free reference phase at the fundamental
wavelength.18 The reference phase is considered to be
accurate because it is obtained from an a priori calibra-
tion of the device. (The calibration interferogram can
therefore be taken with enough signal averaging to yield
a noiseless trace.) Although the spectrum of the pulse
1022 J. Opt. Soc. Am. B / Vol. 19, No. 5 / May 2002
I( ) can be measured on the same experimental trace,19
we consider here a noiseless independent measurement of
the spectral intensity to analyze the differences in the
phase reconstruction. After subtraction of the reference
phase, and a shift along the frequency axis, one obtains
the spectral phase ( ) ( ) ( ). There are a number of different options available for the
Two numerical recipes for the reconstruction of the
electric field from the experimental data I( ) and ()
are explored. Although some reconstruction techniques
in spatial shearing interferometry are based on a modal
approach (i.e., the decomposition of the phase in known
modes, such as two-dimensional polynomials defined over
the pupil of an optical system), it is here more appropriate
to use a zonal approach20 (i.e., local reconstruction). In-
deed, the spectral phases of ultrashort optical pulses that
one encounters in a practical situation cannot be easily
classified in modes (in contrast to the spatial aberrations
of an optical system that are constrained by the systems
symmetries). The techniques presented here rely on the
fact that the pixellated detector at the Fourier plane of
the spectrometer samples the SPIDER interferogram at a
rate that is smaller than the spectral shear . This
naturally arises in the experimental implementation of
SPIDER. The spectral sampling of the detector
means that the input pulse sequence must lie in the time
window [/, /]. Therefore the correct arrange-
ment of the apparatus requires that the delay between
the two interfering pulses be set so that / . The
sampling of the spectral phase at frequency intervals
means that any field whose temporal support is included
in [/, /] can be reconstructed faithfully. To
achieve this in SPIDER, the frequency sweep in the
chirped pulse during the interaction with each test pulse
replica must be kept small compared with the spectral
shear. The frequency sweep is proportional to the tem-
poral support of the pulse that one is characterizing,
while the spectral shear is proportional to the delay be-
tween the two interfering pulses. These considerations
then give / , i.e., . In practice, the ratio of
these two quantities is of the order of ten.
B. Reconstruction of the Spectral Phase in SPIDER
There are several different algorithms that can be used to
reconstruct the electric field from the experimental data
I( ) and (). We present two in detail here.
1. Reconstruction by Integration
The spectral phase ( ) ( ) ( ) extracted length , provided that the appropriate integration for-
from the interferogram can be integrated between
and 0 to give the phase :
0
0
d
0
d
0
0
d . (13)
Reconstruction of the spectral phase of the pulse from the
SPIDER interferogram is thus equivalent to identifying a
C. Dorrer and I. A. Walmsley
function whose average value on every interval of
length is equal to the function that is obtained from
the experimental data. can be obtained directly from
by integration with the use of a trapezoidal approxima-
tion, noting that is sampled on a frequency interval .
calculation of the integral on the right-hand side. Find-
ing the function is the inverse problem to the integra-
tion of a function on an interval 0 , 0 by using
only values of the function at discrete points. The gen-
eral procedure for the latter problem is to consider linear
combinations of the values of the function in the interval
that ensure the accuracy of the integration to be high for
a particular class of functions. When the class of poly-
nomic functions of order lower than a given integer is cho-
sen, these combinations are known as Newton-Cotes for-
mulas, of which the best-known examples are Simpsons
or Bodes rules of integration.18 These can be adapted to
the phase reconstruction problem in the following way.
First, we write the integral as a linear combination of the
unknown values of the phase:
0
0
d a
j
j 0 j , (14)
where a j and j are sets of real numbers between 0
and 1. The right-hand side of this equation can be writ-
ten as a convolution of the (continuous) spectral phase
function with a sum of Dirac functions , so that Eq. (13)
is equivalent to
m, where m a .
j
j j (15)
From the convolution theorem, this is equivalent to (t)
(t)m(t), where the tilde represents a Fourier trans-
form. If m does not have any zeros, then /m, from
which can be determined by an inverse Fourier trans-
form.
For given sets a j and j , the reconstruction of the
phase requires only the following steps: Integration of
the phase difference , which is itself extracted from the
interferogram by Fourier processing, to yield (); a fast
Fourier transform to yield (t); multiplication by the
function 1/m to yield (t) and finally an inverse fast Fou-
rier transform to yield ().
This method provides exact reconstruction of spectral
phases that are polynomic of order N on each interval of
mula is chosen. Specific choices of m are available to
give exact integration for such classes of functions, as we
show in succeeding paragraphs. Furthermore, such an
integration formula leads to exact reconstruction for spec-
tral phases that are polynomials of order N 2 on the
full spectral support of the pulse.
However, higher accuracy for a particular class of func-
tions (in this case polynomials of order N 2) does not
mean higher accuracy in the general case of arbitrary
spectral phase. Also, because the SPIDER phase at
any frequency is the difference between spectral phase at
two frequencies separated by , any phase with periodic-
ity is discarded.
We now consider specific integration formulas:
C. Dorrer and I. A. Walmsley Vol. 19, No. 5 / May 2002 / J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 1023

Midpoint rule of integration: The integral is writ-

ten as m t

3

exp i
t
2
* 2 cos
t
2
. (21)

0
d 0
2
. (16) As m does not have any zeroes in the time domain for this
integration formula, one can take its inverse, and this
leads to the unique determination of . In this case, the
The reconstructed phase is then directly obtained as
error is dominated by the fourth order of the phase. Per-
0 1/ 0 /2 , (17) fect reconstruction is obtained for functions that are up to
third-order polynomials on each interval of length or
without the need for any calculation in the Fourier do- that are global polynomials of up to fifth order.
main, since the convolution is done with a single Dirac Higher-order approximations: It turns out that
delta function. higher-order NewtonCotes formulas do not uniquely
Taking an expansion up to second order in frequency of specify the phase , since the function m(t) has some ze-
the function , one can write roes in the time domain. However, it is possible that, in

principle, other linear combinations that provide accurate
0 0
d d 0 integration for functions other than polynomials (such as
0 0 2 Gaussian quadrature formulas) could be used.

0

2
0

2
2. Reconstruction by Concatenation
This algorithm makes use of the Shannon theorem and is

where the second-order derivative of the phase is taken at
an unknown point f( ) in the interval
each . This integration yields
exact for arbitrary phase functions corresponding to fields
1 2
2 satisfying the criterion of this theorem. That is, any elec-
0 f ,
2 2 2 tric field pulse whose temporal support is included in the
interval [/, /] will be perfectly reconstructed. The
(18)
phase is set to zero at a starting point and is concatenated
every following the formula
0 /2 , for
0 0,

0
0

d * 0 /2
2
24
O
2
2
,
n 1 n n .

An interpolation of the spectrum completes the measure-

(22)

where O( / ) is an upper bound of the second-order

2 2 ment, leading to the knowledge of the electric field on the
derivative of the phase on the interval 0 , 0 . sampling grid 0, , 2..., (N 1) .
The error in this integration technique is bounded by Because of the oversampling performed by the detector
1/24 2 O( 2 / 2 ), which is small compared with for of the spectrometer, multiple sets of the concatenated
most realistic phase functions. This technique will then phase can be obtained with different starting pixels. For
perform well in most cases. For a parabolic phase, example, one can use a sampling grid shifted by m and
2 / 2 f( ) is independent of and adds only a con- integrating following
stant on the retrieved phase, which does not compromise
the accuracy. For a cubic phase, a linear phase is added m 0,
on the reconstructed phase, so that the accuracy is not
m n 1 m n
compromised. The choice of the midpoint rule of integra-
tion thus gives error-free reconstruction of phase func- m n . (23)
tions that are linear on each interval of length or that
are global polynomials of up to third order on the full The number M of different determinations of the elec-
spectral support of the pulse, whatever the coefficients of tric field is of the order of /. Now, since every field
these polynomials are. with temporal support in the interval t,t is de-
Simpsons rule: In this case, the integral is written scribed by a spectral representation with a sampling in-
as terval smaller than /t, each and every reconstruction

from the SPIDER interferogram exactly represents the

0
0
d

6
0 4 0

2
field. Therefore it is possible to use them as a set of rep-
resentations of a single pulse and to determine the statis-

tical properties of the ensemble, that is, the mean field
and the variance at each spectral or temporal point.
0 . (19) These equivalent determinations cannot be averaged
directly in the spectral domain since they are defined on
One then gets different sampling grids. However, they can be averaged

in the temporal domain by choosing a common sampling
grid 0, T ,..., (N 1)T and calculating the Fourier
m 4 ,
6 2 transform of each spectral representation on that com-
(20) mon sampling grid. This is done by writing
1024 J. Opt. Soc. Am. B / Vol. 19, No. 5 / May 2002 C. Dorrer and I. A. Walmsley

1
E m nT
NJ
E m j
j

exp i m j nT
1
exp imn nT
N
E m j
j

exp i 2 jn
N
, (24)

where the sum can be calculated with a fast Fourier

transform algorithm. (Note that the temporal linear
phase mn T must be added to E m .)
The average field is calculated by use of

1
E nT
M
E
m
m nT . (25)

The temporal fields E m are not shifted in time to optimize

their overlap since they are retrieved from the same ex-
tracted phase () and should have the same time refer-
ence. Their respective absolute CEO phase is, however,
arbitrary since it depends only on the choice of the initial
phase for each set, and this cannot be determined from
the SPIDER phase (). The CEO phase is set to an ar-
bitrary constant at a point where the temporal intensity
is high, although a more time-consuming procedure could
be used to optimize the relative phases (as well as the
temporal overlap). A spectral representation can finally
be obtained by Fourier transforming the temporal repre-
sentation

E n E jT exp
j
i
2 nj
N
. (26)

The reconstructed mean field can be compared with a

field whose spectrum is sampled every by padding the
time-domain representation with zeros before taking the
appropriate Fourier transform. This reconstruction algo-
rithm then reveals whether the apparatus settings gave
an insufficient sampling rate. The reconstructed tempo-
ral electric field should be equal to zero at the edges of the
time window [/, /], since this is the sampling that
is used. If this is not the case, then there are systematic
errors in the SPIDER interferogram.

C. Accuracy of the SPIDER Reconstruction

1. Test Pulses
Phase retrieval with the various algorithms presented in
the previous section has been tested on a benchmark set
of test pulses (see Fig. 1). For each pulse in the set, the
spectral amplitude is taken to be E( ) exp(
0)/2 with 0 corresponding to 800 nm and
50 ps1 . This represents a pulse with a Gaussian
temporal intensity of 47 fs at FWHM given a flat spectral
phase. The detector at the output of the spectrometer
has 512 pixels and is linearly calibrated in wavelength be-
tween 750 and 850 nm. The SPIDER interferogram at
400 nm is measured at the second order of diffraction of
the grating using the same array calibrated between 375
and 425 nm. This provides a sampling interval of
Fig. 1. (a) Spectrum (solid curve) and spectral phases (dashed
curves) used in the simulations. (b) Temporal intensity for the
flat phase, the parabolic phase, the cubic phase, and the phase
jump, from top to bottom; in the time domain, the plotted window
is the Nyquist window corresponding to the SPIDER shear.
1.1 ps1 . The shear (obtained with a delay line
with quadratic spectral phase equal to 30,000 fs2 and a
delay equal to 1500 fs) is equal to 5 ps1 , i.e., one
tenth of . The spectral phase structures we have ex-
plored are:
Flat phase, ( ) 0. This corresponds to the
minimum pulse duration for a given spectrum.
Parabolic phase, ( ) (1/2) ( 2 ) ( 0 )/ 2 .
C. Dorrer and I. A. Walmsley Vol. 19, No. 5 / May 2002 / J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 1025

Cubic phase, ( ) (1/6) ( 3 ) ( 0 )/ 3 .

Quartic phase, ( ) 1/24 ( 4 ) ( 0 )/ 4 .
Phase jumps. An infinitely steep phase jump does
not satisfy the Nyquist criterion for finite temporal sup-
port. We choose a spectral phase function of the form
( /2)tanh(20 / ), which does satisfy a Nyquist crite-
rion.

Two classes of phase function were used in these tests:

(1) Polynomial phase functions, where the coefficients
( 2 ) , ( 3 ) , and ( 4 ) were chosen so that the group delay at
the frequency 0 is equal to one third of the
Nyquist limit /, and (2) spectral phases with more com-
plicated forms. In the latter case, these spectral phase
Fig. 2. Difference between the test and the reconstructed
coefficients were chosen so that the group delay at that
phases in the case of the flat phase (three lower curves), the
same frequency is equal to /. This provides a situa- parabolic phase (three middle curves), and the cubic phase (three
tion where significant aliasing is present for a sampling upper curves). In each case, the dashed curve corresponds to I1,
interval . the dotted curve to I2 and the solid curve to the concatenation
We considered the accuracy of the midpoint rule of in- technique.
tegration (I1), the Simpson integration technique (I2) and
the concatenation technique (C).

2. Reconstruction from Noise-Free Experimental Traces

Determining the accuracy of reconstruction for a noiseless
experimental trace addresses the question of the accuracy
of the reconstruction algorithm itself and allows one to
track systematic errors in the apparatus parameters or
the failure of the method. One looks for ambiguous or
badly reconstructed pulse shapes.
An important parameter in the reconstruction algo-
rithm is the filtering of the field autocorrelation compo-
nent in the pseudo-time-domain conjugate to the wave-
length domain in which the interferogram is measured.
This is a key step for Fourier transform spectral interfer-
ometry. In the rest of this paper, the filtering in this
pseudo-temporal domain is performed by use of a rectan-
gular window with width of 220 pixels, unless otherwise
specified. This width does not modify the results in the
absence of noise as long as all the information contained
in the interferometric component is kept. In the pres-
ence of noise, this window can be used to remove some
noise components at pseudo-time points outside the re-
gion of interest and thus to reduce the overall noise power
in the reconstructed trace. An appropriate choice of the
shape of the filter might optimize the accuracy of Fourier
transform spectral interferometry (FTSI) in the presence
of noise, although to our knowledge this has never been
thoroughly studied. Reconstruction from noiseless inter-
ferograms is excellent, because the retrieval of the field
from the experimental trace is algebraic. In contrast to
several other pulse characterization techniques, which re-
quire iterative algorithms applied to large two-
dimensional sets of data, we require here only two Fou-
rier transforms performed on a single one-dimensional
vector. As a consequence, for noise-free interferograms,
the RMS error is of the order of 104 for the flat phase
and the polynomial modulations for the three algorithms.
As can be seen in Fig. 2, this corresponds to very small
errors in the spectral phase.
When aliasing is present with the sampling (i.e., if
the electric field pulse has significant energy outside the
window [/, /]) the concatenation technique per-
Fig. 3. Difference between the test and the reconstructed
phases by the concatenation technique (solid curves) and the in-
tegration technique I1 (dashed curves) in the case of the second-
and third-order phases corresponding to fields not satisfying the
Nyquist limit.
forms poorly, as can be seen in Fig. 3. This situation can
be realized if ( 2 ) or ( 3 ) are set so that the group delay at
0 is equal to /. The accuracy is of the or-
der of 0.2 in the two cases. It must be pointed out, how-
ever, that the sinusoidal behavior of the reconstructed
field is due to the padding operation performed before
Fourier transforming the reconstructed temporal field to
get a spectral field sampled every . Visual inspection
of the reconstructed field on the spectral sampling is
much more satisfying. One must keep in mind, however,
that the latter field has the value zero outside the interval
[/, /], which is not the case for the test field, and
which explains the low accuracy. For the same phase
structure, no significant error is present with the two in-
tegration techniques, and is smaller than 103 . This
confirms that integration techniques can reconstruct any
sufficiently regular function even if the resulting field
does not satisfy the Nyquist limit. In the case of a
fourth-order polynomial for which the group delay at
0 is equal to /, a systematic parabolic er-
ror is present in the case of integration method I1 (Fig. 4).
However, this error remains very small compared with
the value of the phase (of the order of tens of radians).
1026 J. Opt. Soc. Am. B / Vol. 19, No. 5 / May 2002 C. Dorrer and I. A. Walmsley

With the higher-order integration technique I2, no such

systematic error is present, resulting in a better accuracy
(3 104 for I2 versus 1.6 103 for I1). Since the re-
sulting field does not satisfy the Nyquist limit, the value
of for the concatenation technique is slightly higher
(4 103 ), but this is small enough to yield good recon-
struction. For I1, perfect reconstruction is obtained for
any polynomial up to third order. For I2, perfect recon-
struction is extended to any polynomial up to fifth order.
For rapidly varying phases, such as a phase jump at
the center of the spectrum, differences between the vari-
ous reconstruction techniques are confirmed (see Fig. 5).
The concatenation technique performs poorly, since alias-
ing is significant. A systematic error is present on the
Fig. 5. Difference between the test and the reconstructed
spectral phase reconstructed by I1. This error is reduced
phases in the case of a phase jump for the concatenation tech-
when I2 is used. The accuracy is equal to 4.2 102 for nique (solid curve), the integration technique I1 (dashed curve)
I2 and 6.5 102 for I1. and the integration technique I2 (dotted curve).
When no aliasing is present, all these techniques give
excellent results. In the presence of rapidly varying
phases that have significant aliasing with sampling ,
the results of the concatenation technique are poor. Not
surprisingly, better results are obtained when the spec-
tral shear is corrected. Integration techniques perform
better even with some undersampling. The low-order
technique I1 tends to smooth out rapidly varying spectral
phase structures. The higher-order technique I2, which
increases the contribution of higher-order polynomials in
the overall phase, reduces this smoothing, leading to a
higher-fidelity reconstruction.

3. Reconstruction in the Presence of Noise

A reconstruction algorithm that performs well for noise-
free data is of little use if it falls apart when experimental
imperfections are present. Thus the influence of noise on
these different algorithms has also been examined.
The most common class of noise present in experimen-
tal signals is pixel-uncorrelated additive Gaussian noise.
This kind of noise describes, for example, the shot noise
and electronic noise due to the pixellated detector at the
Fourier plane of the spectrometer. We modeled pulse re-
construction from interferograms with this type of noise.
Fig. 4. Difference between the test and the reconstructed
phases in the case of a fourth-order polynomial phase corre-
sponding to a field not satisfying the Nyquist limit for the con-
catenation technique (solid curve), the integration technique I1
(dashed curve) and the integration technique I2 (dotted curve).
The small systematic error present when I1 is used disappears
when I2 is used.
Fig. 6. RMS field error of the reconstruction of a flat phase by
the integration technique I1 as a function of the noise fraction.
The error for I2 and C exactly overlap with the plotted curve.
The higher left-hand inset represents a simulated interferogram
with a noise fraction of 104 ; the lower right-hand inset repre-
sents a simulated interferogram with a noise fraction of 101 .
The maximum amplitude of the uncorrupted, calculated
interferogram was set to one, and noise was added. The
variance of the noise ranged from 104 (low noise; see up-
per left-hand inset in Fig. 6) to 101 (strong noise; see
lower right-hand inset in Fig. 6). The experimental noise
usually present on a SPIDER interferogram is of the or-
der of 103 , but this value obviously depends on the dy-
namics of the detection and analog-to-digital conversion.
The curves plotted in Fig. 7 were obtained by simulating
interferograms with 100 different noise fractions. For
each noise fraction, ten interferograms were calculated by
using different random noise in each case, and recon-
structions were performed on each. The statistics of
these reconstructions were used in determining the accu-
racy of the reconstruction according to the RMS-error
measure.
The influence of the noise on the accuracy for the inte-
gration technique I1 is summarized in Fig. 6. The three
techniques were found to be equally sensitive to noise
when there is no systematic error for the reconstruction of
the phase. The phases reconstructed by the integration
technique I1 are plotted in Fig. 7 for different levels of
noise. The corresponding values of are 8 103 ,
3 102 , 102 , and 4 101 . Note that the phase is
C. Dorrer and I. A. Walmsley
recovered accurately where the spectral density is high,
as expected, since the Fourier-transform spectral-
interferometry-signal amplitude used to extract the spec-
tral phase difference at a frequency is proportional to
the spectral density at that frequency. The spectral
phase degrades toward the leading and trailing edges of
the pulse, where the signal-to-noise ratio decreases.
When the reconstruction accuracy is low even for noise-
free interferograms, is first influenced by the systematic
errors at low levels of noise and then by the noise itself as
this reaches a sufficient level. Reconstruction of the
phase jump (see Fig. 8) clearly demonstrates this. In this
case, the high-order integration I2 is still the best choice,
since it provides the best noise-free reconstruction and is
less sensitive to noise than the other techniques.
Optimal filtering increases the reconstruction accuracy,
because filtering the interferometric component in the
Fourier domain removes the noise components outside
the temporal range of interest. For example, in the case
of the flat phase, taking a 40-pixel window for the rectan-
gular filter (instead of the 220 pixels used in the simula-
tions presented thus far) reduces by a factor of 1.25.
One reason for this relatively small gain is that the noise
after filtering scales as the square root of the number of
pixels of the amplitude filter (for uncorrelated, white
noise). Another reason is that all the reconstruction
Fig. 7. Reconstructed phases for a flat test phase for levels of
noise of 104 , 103 , 102 , and 101 , from bottom to top. The
corresponding values of the RMS field error are respectively
8 103 , 3 102 , 102 and 4 101 . systems used with ultrashort optical pulses have time-
Fig. 8. Accuracy of the reconstruction of the phase jump by the
integration technique I1 (solid curve), the integration technique
I2 (dotted curve), and the concatenation technique (dashed
curve) as a function of the noise fraction.
Vol. 19, No. 5 / May 2002 / J. Opt. Soc. Am. B 1027
techniques perform some averaging, thus naturally can-
celing the effect of high frequency noise.
It is also useful to calculate the influence of the shear
on the accuracy in the presence of noise. The noise n( )
on the extracted phase () is integrated to a random
0
phase component 1/ d n( ) on the phase () (as-
suming the low-order integration method). If the shear
is halved, the random phase is multiplied by 2, and so is
. This effect is confirmed by our simulations. The
shear should therefore be set as large as possible to re-
duce the influence of noise, as long as it remains small
enough that the Nyquist criterion is satisfied.
We have shown that the several reconstruction algo-
rithms for SPIDER are equally sensitive to the influence
of random noise on the interferogram. Systematic errors
compromise the accuracy even at low noise levels.
Therefore the technique that performs best for noise-free
reconstruction is the most useful tool in the general case.
In all the cases we have tested, the higher-order integra-
tion technique, based on the Simpsons rule of integration,
gives the best results, although the lower-order technique
also performs well. We have also shown that these tech-
niques naturally reduce the effect of noise on the pulse re-
construction and that a larger shear diminishes the effect
of noise.
4. Comments
It is striking that integration provides error-free recon-
struction of the spectral phase even when the temporal
electric field does not satisfy the Nyquist criterion. In
some sense, assuming that a phase is polynomial of a
given order modifies the number of parameters needed for
a complete specification of the field (for example, a poly-
nomial of order N is completely determined by its value at
N 1 points). However, one should note that, because
the information is recorded as a phase difference between
frequencies separated by , any periodic function with
this period is discarded. (This class of function is inaccu-
rately reconstructed by the concatenation algorithm.)
Thus higher accuracy is obtained by integration, except
for the class of functions with such periodicity. It is
therefore important to set the shear to sample the spec-
trum correctly. Finally, we note that most linear optical
shift-invariant transfer functions with relatively smooth
phases. (Examples of such include a compressor, a
stretcher, or propagation in a dispersive material.)
Therefore, integration using the polynomial approxima-
tion on the shear interval is the optimal reconstruction al-
gorithm.
4. CONCLUSION
We have presented the RMS-field-error technique as an
efficient test of accuracy of ultrashort pulse reconstruc-
tion techniques. This criterion is simpler than others
that have been proposed, provides for easy interpretation,
and can be calculated quickly. The application of this cri-
terion to SPIDER has enabled us to test several algo-
rithms for the reconstruction of the spectral phase from
the interferogram. The concatenation technique is based
on the use of the sampling theorem and provides exact re-
1028 J. Opt. Soc. Am. B / Vol. 19, No. 5 / May 2002 C. Dorrer and I. A. Walmsley

construction as long as the shear satisfies the Nyquist cri-

terion. An additional small assumption regarding the lo-
cal regularity of the phase allows the use of more
dW E, E
2
1

dtd W t,

powerful integration techniques with numerical accuracy

comparable to concatenation. These methods are based
on the midpoint rule of integration and Simpsons for-
W t, 2 1/2
. (B1)

mula. Since the sensitivity to the noise on the experi- One can develop the Wigner error as:
mental data is the same for all three techniques, our re-
sults suggest that this latter integration technique is the
best choice for reconstruction in spectral shearing inter- dW E, E 2
2
1

dtd W t, 2
ferometry. All these techniques also allow a test of the
consistency of the reconstructioni.e., how well the re- 2W t, W t, W t, 2 .
constructed field matches the experimental dataas well
(B2)
as the precisioni.e., how similar are the various fields
19
extracted from the same redundant experimental data. Using the Moyals formula

The precision and consistency of pulse reconstruction us- 1
ing SPIDER is explored in the companion paper.9 dtd W t, W t,
2

APPENDIX A: MINIMIZATION OF THE RMS

ERROR FUNCTION REGARDING THE


dtE t E * t , 2

ABSOLUTE PHASE AND TIME DELAY this can be simplified as

For normalized fields, the square of the RMS field error is 2 2
dW E, E 2 dt E t 2 2 dtE t E * t

E E
2 2 2
1
2

d E E * c.c.

dt E t 2 . 2

(B3)

2 2 Re
1
2

d E E * . (A1) Thus for normalized fields

Minimization of this quantity is equivalent to the maxi-

mization of Re
d E( )expi( 0 t0)E*(), and
dW E, E 2 2 2

dtE t E * t . 2
(B4)

one has Following Appendix A, if the absolute phases of the

fields are free parameters, the RMS field error is

1
max 0 ,t 0 Re d E exp i 0 t 0 E * 1 1/2
2 22 d E E *
2

maxt 0
1
2

d E exp i t 0 E * (A2) 22

dtE t E * t 1/2
. (B5)

since 0 arg d E( )E * ( )exp(it0) maximizes
the integral.
As the integral on the right-hand side is the Fourier
transform of the quantity u( ) E( )E * ( ), one gets
2 2 * 1 maxt0u(t0), where u is the Fourier trans-
form of u. Minimization of the error can then be per-
formed by calculating u( ) and finding the maximum of
its Fourier transform u. Because one uses a discrete rep-
resentation of fields in the spectral and temporal domain,
one can either pad the data in the spectral domain or fit
the maximum of u(t) to get a better estimate of the
maximum.13 These two procedures were found neces-
sary only for accuracy better than 103 .
Combining Eqs. (B4) and (B5) gives
dW E, E 2 2 2 1 1/4 2 . (B6)
The Wigner error can be directly calculated from the
RMS field error, with is a large gain in simplicity and
speed. The functional shape of Eq. (B6) proves that
these norms are equivalent (in other words, resemblance
of two fields according to one of these criteria is equiva-
lent to resemblance according to the other criterion).
There is thus no particular advantage of the Wigner cri-
terion for the description of the accuracy of the recon-
struction, as long as an analytic signal representation is
available. This is also true for the ambiguity function
and the two-time or two-frequency correlation function.

C. Dorrer is now with Bell Laboratories, Lucent Tech-

APPENDIX B: EQUIVALENCE OF THE nologies, 101 Crawfords Corner Road, Holmdel, NJ
WIGNER ERROR AND THE RMS FIELD 07733. He can be reached by e-mail at dorrer@lucent.com.
ERROR I. Walmsley is now with the Clarendon Laboratory, Uni-
For two fields E and E , with respective Wigner functions versity of Oxford, Parks Road, Oxford, OX1 3PU, UK.
W and W , the Wigner error is defined as: His e-mail address is walmsley@physics.ox.ac.uk.
C. Dorrer and I. A. Walmsley
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