Compact optical autocorrelator with 0.1-meter scanning range using a rotating pair of mirrors

We present a rotating pair of mirrors based optical autocorrelator which is capable of providing a 0.1 m scanning range. The rotating mirror-pair technique enables rapid data update-rate, compactness, and simpler data post-processing compared to that of conventional linear motion-based optical autocorrelators. We optimized the geometrical design of the mirror-pair configuration by using off-the-shelf mirrors and conducted a simulation to calculate the expected capability of the scanning range. By exploiting a He-Ne laser as a light source, we validated the performance of the autocorrelator in its provision of a 100 mm scanning range and 0.2 Hz data update-rate, which was limited by the adopted commercial data sampling device, and not limited by the proposed principle. The developed autocorrelator is expected to be adopted for variousapplications that require sub-cm-1 spectroscopic resolution.