Single Shot Temporal Contrast Measurement of Subpicosecond Pulses

We propose a new single-shot third order correlator to measure the temporal contrast of pulses in the picosecond range of high power chain lasers. We use time-to-angular coding to transfer the temporal contrast information to a 3 omega probe pulse. We determine the temporal window with the resolution obtained from this technique and predict via simulations the time-to-space coding as well as the time-to-frequency coding. We demonstrate the concept experimentally. The image acquisition is performed with a simple 16 bit CCD camera. An amplitude mask can easily improve the dynamics.