A comparison of three pulse-retrieval algorithms in frequency-resolved optical gating

Abstract

Three algorithms, the iterative Fourier transform (IFT), principal component generalized projections (PCGP), and simulated annealing (SA), are applied to retrieve the intensity and phase profiles of Gaussian pulses from numerically calculated SHG FROG traces. SA was seen to perform better than IFT for pulses with self-phase modulation, but at the cost of a much longer computational time. PCGP was seen to be the most efficient routine for pulse retrieval in terms of both speed and robustness.