Temporal resolution of ultrafast compressive imaging using a single-chirped optical probe

Ultrafast compressive imaging captures three-dimensional spatiotemporal information of transient events in a single shot. When a single-chirped optical probe is applied, the temporal information is obtained from the probe modu-lated in amplitude or phase using a direct frequency-time mapping method. Here, we extend the analysis of the tem-poral resolution of conventional one-dimensional ultrafast measurement techniques such as spectral interferometry to that in three-dimensional ultrafast compressive imaging. In this way, both the amplitude and phase of the probe are nec-essary for a full Fourier transform method, which obtains temporal information with an improved resolution deter-mined by probe spectral bandwidth. The improved temporal resolution potentially enables ultrafast compressive imaging with an effective imaging speed at the quadrillion-frames-per-second level. (c) 2023 Optica Publishing Group