Dynamic holography for ultrashort light pulses

The excitation of nonuniform holographic gratings by ultrashort light pulses in nonlinear cubic media is considered. The relaxation and the diffusion of the pulse-induced grating are investigated. The diffraction problem of the induced grating is solved using both the perturbation theory and the coupled-wave approach. It is shown that the measurement of the angular or spectral distribution of the diffracted probe light makes it possible to determine the complex-valued coherence function completely for a single nonreproducible pulse. A simple method for the determination of the exciting pulse area is proposed; it allows us to deduce the integral amplitude and duration for the pulse, which can serve as a good approximation for their corresponding real values.