A new method for measuring the pulse-front distortion of arbitrary shapes in high-power ultrashort laser systems

We present a new method that can be used to calculate pulse-front distortion by measuring the spectral interference of two point-diffraction fields in their overlapped district. We demonstrate, for the first time, the measurement of the pulse-front distortion of the pulse from a complex multi-pass amplification system, which exists in almost all high-power laser systems, and obtain the irregular pulse-front distribution. The method presented does not need any reference light or assumption about the pulse-front distribution, and has an accuracy of several femtoseconds.