Even scientists can be fooled--twice!  Ultrafast-optical scientists were fooled in the 1960s by the "coherent artifact" into thinking their pulses were erroneously short. Now, decades later, the coherent artifact fiasco has resurfaced with a vengeance!  See how we're trying to help our community to make more honest measurements of their pulses.

Oceanic rogue waves sink dozens of ocean-going ships annually.  Unfortunately, they're difficult to generate in the lab and so cannot be studied in order to predict their destructive arrival.  But it's easy to generate optical rogue waves.  Unfortunately, they cannot be measured.  That is, until we took up the challenge.

We've solved most ultrashort-laser-pulse-measurement problems. But what about measuring two different pulses simultaneously?  Sure you could use two separate devices, but much better is to use a single clever device that measures both pulses simultaneously.  We've figured out how to do this using an elegant beam geometry.

We've developed two different techniques for measuring pulses completely in space and time.  But when such measurements involve scanning over spatial coordinates, unavoidable mechanical vibrations can wash out some of the phase information.  See how we use a mathematical technique called "phase diversity" to retrieve it without requiring additional measurements.