Frequency-resolved optical gating measurement of ultrashort pulses passing through a high numerical aperture objective

We investigate using collinear type II second harmonic generation frequency-resolved optical gating (SHG FROG) to measure the pulse intensity and phase at the focus of high numerical aperture (NA) oil objectives. Because of the strong focusing for such objectives, it is not clear theoretically that such a measurement should work. Such objectives can produce severe distortions of the pulse as a function of radius in the objective. In addition, the standard SHG FROG algorithms are based on the assumption that the fundamental and second harmonic fields are plane waves that can be described by the paraxial approximation, and for high NA objectives, such assumptions are suspect. We show that such measurements work remarkably well. The tight focus, while a theoretical difficulty, eliminates many of the problems traditionally associated with SHG FROG including the difficulty of phase matching and walkoff of different polarizations in the crystal. Specifically, we use collinear type II SHG FROG to measure the intensity and phase at the focus of a Zeiss CP-Achromat 100x, 1.25 NA, infinity-corrected oil objective, and accurately retrieve 20 fs pulses.