A new application of polymer dispersed liquid crystals: Measurements of ultrashort light pulses with femtosecond accuracy

The self-diffraction technique has been applied to measure subpicosecond pulsewidth using Polymer Dispersed Liquid Crystals as nonlinear materials. The experimental data agree with the ones obtained by conventional autocorrelation technique thus pointing out the advantages of cheap and handy PDLC over commonly used high optical quality nonlinear crystals.