Press Releases

Swamp Optics' GRENOUILLE Receives Prestigious R&D 100 Award for 2003

Award recognizes product's extensive innovations in ultrashort-laser-pulse measurement

Atlanta, July 11, 2003 — Swamp Optics, LLC., a producer of compact and powerful devices for characterizing ultrashort laser pulses, announced today that its GRENOUILLE product has been recognized with an R&D 100 award as one of the top 100 technical innovations of the year.

Sponsored by R&D Magazine since the 1960s, R&D 100 Awards honor technologically significant products and are widely recognized as a mark of excellence across scientific, technological, and academic communities. Past R&D 100 award winners include the photo flash cube (1965), the fax machine (1975), the Kodak Photo CD (1991), and HDTV (1998).

"We are honored by this award and are excited to see GRENOUILLE among a long list of highly significant products and inventions," says Rick Trebino, founder and director of Swamp Optics. "It recognizes the solid technological and scientific innovations that make GRENOUILLE a uniquely powerful and flexible ultrashort laser pulse characterization tool."

Ultrashort laser pulses-pulses with durations of about 10 picoseconds or less-have applications in many areas, including telecommunications, electronics, biology, and chemistry. However, the pulse intensity and phase vs. time have always been difficult to measure, and for many years laser users have had to settle for only the pulse "intensity autocorrelation," at best a rough measure of the pulse intensity with no phase information. Short pulses are often also plagued with distortions that can severely distort data in any experiment, including "spatial chirp," in which pulse color varies transversely across the beam, and "pulse-front tilt," in which pulse intensity contours are tilted with respect to propagation direction. Until GRENOUILLE, a comprehensive pulse measurement that returned this kind of information was difficult, if not impossible, to obtain.

Using GRENOUILLE, measuring these and other important pulse characteristics (such as the beam spatial profile), is not only feasible and accurate, but also very simple. Its ingenious, streamlined design employs only a few simple optical elements and completely eliminates the intricate and time-consuming alignment procedure required by other pulse measurement techniques. Also more sensitive than other approaches, GRENOUILLE's operating range (~ 700 to 1100 nm) nicely matches that of most ultrafast Ti:Sapphire lasers and amplifiers, making it ideal for most everyday diagnostics as well as many more exotic applications.

GRENOUILLE is based on the Frequency-Resolved Optical Gating (FROG) pulse measurement method pioneered by Rick Trebino and coworkers in the 1990s. FROG is a well-established technique for accurately determining critical pulse information, including the time-dependent (or, equivalently, frequency-dependent) intensity and phase of an ultrashort laser pulse. The subject of five patents, FROG is rigorous, general, and accurate, and is a widely used technique with many applications.

About Swamp Optics, LLC.

Founded in 2001, Swamp Optics, LLC. offers cost-effective quality devices to measure ultrashort
laser pulses. The company's products feature frequency-resolved optical gating (FROG), the most robust and reliable method for measuring the time-dependent intensity and phase of an ultrashort pulse. Swamp Optics' primary products are GRENOUILLEs and custom FROG devices, the most robust, compact, and simple units available to measure full laser pulse intensity and phase, including the beam spatial profile and spatial chirp.