Bandwidth-Limited Diffraction of Femtosecond Pulses from Photorefractive Quantum Wells - Quantum Electronics, IEEE Journal of

The diffraction of 100-fs pulses from the static gratings of photorefractive quantum wells (QW’s) produces diffracted pulses that are nearly transform-limited, despite the strong dispersion near the quantum-confined excitonic transitions. This quality makes the QW’s candidates for use in femtosecond pulse shaping, although the currently limited bandwidth of the quantum-confined excitonic transitions broadens the diffracted pulses. Femtosecond electric-field cross correlation and spectral interferometry techniques completely characterize the low-intensity pulses diffracted from stand-alone photorefractive QW’s, and from QW’s placed inside a Fourier-domain femtosecond pulse shaper.