1Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics, State Key Laboratory of High Field Laser Physics, Shanghai, China
2University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Center of Materials Science and Optoelectronics Engineering, Beijing, China
3Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics, CAS Center for Excellence in Ultra-intense Laser Science, Shanghai, China
Temporal contrast (TC) is one of the most important parameters of an ultrahigh intense laser pulse. The third-order autocorrelator or cross correlator has been widely used in the past decades to characterize the TC of an ultraintense laser pulse. A novel and simple single-shot fourth-order autocorrelator (FOAC) to characterize the TC with higher time resolution and better pulse contrast fidelity in comparison to third-order correlators is proposed. The single-shot fourth-order autocorrelation consists of a frequency-degenerate four-wave mixing process and a sum-frequency mixing process. The proof-of-principle experiments show that a dynamic range of ~1011 compared with the noise level, a time resolution of ~160 fs, and a time window of 65 ps can successfully be obtained using the single-shot FOAC, which is to-date the highest dynamic range with simultaneously high time resolution for single-shot TC measurement. Furthermore, the TC of a laser pulse from a petawatt laser system is successfully measured in single shot with a dynamic range of about 2 × 1010 and simultaneously a time resolution of 160 fs.