Since the invention of the laser, there has been a fast race to develop new sources, in particular in the field of ultrafast pulsed lasers, with durations in the range of the femtosecond (1 fs=10^-15 s). New techniques for the measurement of those pulses are every time under development to characterize the new laser sources in the temporal domain.
However, it was necessary to introduce a new robust and reliable technique for the measurement of time dependent polarization pulses, capable to extend this characterization to the spatiotemporal domain.
This full characterization was not available before the execution of this project and it is very useful for the applications of ultrashort lasers.
The main aim of the project was to develop new cutting-edge techniques for the full spatiotemporal measurement of ultrashort pulses with arbitrary time-evolving polarization, providing new information from the experiments that was unavailable with other existing techniques.
As a result of this project, a new robust and accurate technique for the measurement of the polarization of vector pulses has been developed. Moreover, this technique has been extended with spatial resolution, providing the full spatiotemporal polarization reconstruction of vector beams, which was the core of the project.