Ptychography for Multidimensional Characterization of Spatiotemporal Ultrafast Pulses

Tailoring pulses with intertwined spatial and temporal degrees of freedom is a promising research area that offers applications in nonlinear optics, precision machining, and imaging to mention a few. The key requirement for harnessing such spatiotemporal light structures in their entirety is to accurately discern their physical properties. Here, we demonstrate that ptychography can be applied to reveal the modal, frequency, and temporal attributes of such ultrafast spatiotemporal optical pulses. To demonstrate the potential of our scheme, we examine optical fields with intricate spatial and spectrotemporal correlations. Further, since the exact structure of the pulses is determined utilizing purely linear interactions, our approach can serve to probe and correct a great variety of spatiotemporal designs.