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GRENOUILLE products can be purchased directly from Swamp Optics! See How to Buy for details and contact information.

GRENOUILLE received the 2005 Circle of Excellence award as one of the twenty-five most technically innovative optics products of the year!


GRENOUILLE's design was recognized with a prestigious R&D100 Award

GRENOUILLE Overview

The world's most powerful ultrashort-laser-pulse measurement device, GRENOUILLE combines full-information pulse measurement with much-needed experimental simplicity. It requires only a few simple optical elements and has no intricate alignment procedure.

GRENOUILLE tells you more about your pulse with less effort than ever thought possible. And it can measure pulses from a wide variety of sources, from the lowest-energy oscillator to the highest-intensity amplifier. Several GRENOUILLE devices are available, for pulses from a few femtoseconds to several picoseconds.

GRENOUILLE is also extremely compact and more sensitive than other pulse diagnostics, including even those that don't yield the full intensity and phase. GRENOUILLE's operating range (~ 700 to 1100 nm) nicely matches that of most ultrafast Ti:Sapphire lasers and amplifiers, so it should be ideal for most everyday diagnostics as well as many more exotic ones.

GRENOUILLE can operate alone—yielding the FROG spectrogram on a video monitor—or with frame-grabber hardware and FROG software—to yield the precise pulse intensity and phase vs. time.

GRENOUILLE at a Glance

  • Yields the pulse intensity and phase vs. time
  • Yields the pulse spectrum and spectral phase
  • Measures the beam spatial profile
  • Measures the spatial chirp
  • Measures the pulse-front tilt
  • Makes no assumptions about the pulse
  • Requires no alignment
  • High sensitivity
  • Offers real-time operation (10 pps)
  • Features minimal effort, weight, size, and cost
  • Available in five bold colors

The Details

We offer two types of GRENOUILLE products: one for Ti:Sapphire and Solid State lasers, and another for Fiber and Telecom lasers. Click on the buttons below to download their respective brochures.

  

If you want to quickly glance at the specifications of each device, jump over to the specs pages for Ti:Sapphire and Nd/Yt/Fiber GRENOUILLEs

Read more about GRENOUILLE

Configuring GRENOUILLE outlines typical pulse measurement setups using GRENOUILLE alone and coupled with related pulse analysis tools.

GRENOUILLE Tutorial reveals GRENOUILLE's patented inner workings and the science behind its pulse measurement capabilities.

And last but not least, you might want to look over the GRENOUILLE and FROG section of our FAQ.

 



Using GRENOUILLE
couldn't be easier!
Unlike other pulse-measurement devices, GRENOUILLE is very easy to use. It comes pre-aligned, and aligning your beam into it is trivial.

Simply set GRENOUILLE to measure the beam spatial profile, connect the camera output to a video monitor or frame-grabber, send a fraction of your beam into it, and walk your beam to the center of the camera. Then switch to the temporal mode and you're already generating FROG traces of pulses!

GRENOUILLE will never become misaligned for the simple reason that there are no alignment knobs to turn! And it's very tolerant to input beam wander.

Even better, using Femtosoft Technologies' QuickFrog frame-grabber and software, you'll have the full intensity and phase of your pulse and just about everything else you could imagine about it.

This includes the spatio-temporal distortions—spatial chirp and pulse-front tilt—which are more common than first realized and can badly distort experimental data. Spatial chirp yields a tilt in the GRENOUILLE trace, and pulse-front tilt yields a GRENOUILLE trace displaced along the delay axis. Indeed, GRENOUILLE is the most accurate measure of these distortions that money can buy.

There's not much more to know about your laser output!
 
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