Electric field sampling of modelocked pulses from a quantum cascade laser.

We measure the electric field of a train of modelocked pulses from a quantum cascade laser in the time-domain by electro-optic sampling. The method relies on synchronizing the modelocked pulses to a reference laser and is applied to 15-ps pulses generated by a 2-THz quantum cascade laser. The pulses from the actively modelocked laser are completely characterized in field and in time with a sub-ps resolution, allowing us to determine the amplitude and phase of each cavity mode. The technique can also give access to the carrier-envelope phase of each pulse.