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Hi Dale

While I agree with Craig and Pascal that with shorter laser pulses you have to be more 
careful about dispersion, I do not think that you need the autocorrelator that Pascal 
mentioned.

Since a prism compressor can only compensate GVD, it is sufficient to just optimize the 
signal you get from a dye solution under 2 photon excitation under your microscope while 
tuning the compressor.

I wonder though how the APE device works, is that a nonlinear autocorrelator? It is tough to 
analyze a laser pulse just by its autocorrelation, as you do not have the spectral phase 
information and many different pulse profiles can have the same autocorrelation. To really 
diagnose dispersion, you would need the spectral phase, which to my knowledge only FROG 
and SPIDER can give you for ultrafast pulses (commercially available, at least).

Best,
Reto