How to measure laser chirp rate at single-emitter excitation energies

Timothée Mounier; Moritz Kaiser; Mert Tuncel; Iker Avila Arenas; René Schwarz; Ria G. Krämer; Stefan Nolte; Florian Kappe; Yusuf Karli; Gregor Weihs; Vikas Remesh

arXiv · 2512.05541

How to measure laser chirp rate at single-emitter excitation energies

Timothée Mounier·Moritz Kaiser·Mert Tuncel·Iker Avila Arenas·René Schwarz·Ria G. Krämer·Stefan Nolte·Florian Kappe·Yusuf Karli·Gregor Weihs·Vikas Remesh

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Abstract

We present a simple and direct method for measuring laser chirp rate, i.e., group delay dispersion (GDD) of ultrashort laser pulses at power levels compatible with single-quantum-emitter excitation. Traditional pulse characterization techniques rely on nonlinear optical processes that require high peak powers, making them unsuitable for the attojoule-to-femtojoule regime relevant to quantum photonics. Our approach utilizes a wavelength-to-time mapping method in which the arrival times of spectrally filtered components of a broadband pulse are recorded using a superconducting nanowire single-photon detector and correlated via a high-resolution time-tagging system. The resulting linear relationship between wavelength and arrival time directly yields the dispersion parameter and, subsequently, the GDD. Beyond single-emitter excitation, this technique can be applied in areas such as single-photon spectroscopy, ultralow-power optical communications, and time-domain quantum control, where linear and non-destructive dispersion characterization is essential.

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Timothée Mounier, Moritz Kaiser, Mert Tuncel, Iker Avila Arenas, René Schwarz, Ria G. Krämer, Stefan Nolte, Florian Kappe, Yusuf Karli, Gregor Weihs, Vikas Remesh. 2025-12-05. How to measure laser chirp rate at single-emitter excitation energies. https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.05541

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