The real-time measurement of fast non-repetitive events is arguably the most challenging problem in the field of instrumentation and measurement. These instruments are needed for investigating rapid transient phenomena such as chemical reactions, fast physical phenomena, phase transitions, protein dynamics in living cells and impairments in data networks. Optical spectrometers are the basic instrument for performing sensing and detection in chemistry, physics and biology applications. Unfortunately, the scan rate of a spectrometer is often too long compared with the timescale of the physical processes of interest. In terms of conventional optical spectroscopy, this temporal mismatch means that the instrument is too slow to perform real-time single-shot spectroscopic measurements. Single-shot measurement tools such as frequency-resolved optical gating (FROG) and spectral phase interferometry for direct electric-field reconstruction (SPIDER) are, although powerful, therefore unable to perform pulse-resolved spectral measurements in real time. RogueScope is a commercially available single-shot optical spectrometer with a frame rate of up to Billion frames per second, at least tens of thousand times faster than the next fastest spectrometer. The RogueScope real-time capability is enabled by photonic time-stretch implemented by Time-Stretch Dispersive Fourier Transform. The RogueScope can capture large data sets to reveal rare events with meaningful accuracy. Applications include optical rouge waves, laser transients, chemical reactions, and nonlinear dynamics. RogueScope is an essential tool for measurements of fast stochastic processes such as laser transients, rare events and outliers in optical systems. RogueScope is ideal for capturing non-Gaussian statistics that are signatures of complex dynamics.
|
