  In most applications of ultrashort pulse lasers, temporal compressors are
used to achieve a desired pulse duration in a target or sample, and precise
temporal characterization is important. The dispersion-scan (d-scan) pulse
characterization technique usually involves using glass wedges to impart
variable, well-defined amounts of dispersion to the pulses, while measuring the
spectrum of a nonlinear signal produced by those pulses. This works very well
for broadband few-cycle pulses, but longer, narrower bandwidth pulses are much
more difficult to measure this way. Here we demonstrate the concept of
self-calibrating d-scan, which extends the applicability of the d-scan
technique to pulses of arbitrary duration, enabling their complete measurement
without prior knowledge of the introduced dispersion. In particular, we show
that the pulse compressors already employed in chirped pulse amplification
(CPA) systems can be used to simultaneously compress and measure the temporal
profile of the output pulses on-target in a simple way, without the need of
additional diagnostics or calibrations, while at the same time calibrating the
often-unknown differential dispersion of the compressor itself. We demonstrate
the technique through simulations and experiments under known conditions.
Finally, we apply it to the measurement and compression of 27.5 fs pulses from
a CPA laser.
