All-optical self-stabilization of carrier-envelope phase offset in few-cycle pulses by optical parametric amplifiers

We present versatile schemes of white-light-seeded optical parametric amplifiers (OPA), which permit generation of extremely short visible and infrared pulses with precisely controlled oscillations of the electric field. Passive locking of carrier-envelope phase is demonstrated without generation of octave-spanning bandwidths and active phase tracking. Next, we show that a modified OPA can also be employed for a high-precision measurement of the pulse-to-pulse drift of the carrier-envelope phase.