Efficient time-to-space conversion of femtosecond optical pulses

We report femtosecond time-to-space transformation by means of a potassium niobate nonlinear optical crystal inside a femtosecond pulse shaper. We achieve an upconversion efficiency higher than 50%, a more than 500-fold increase as compared with previous results. We also present theoretical guidelines for estimating the efficiency of such time-to-space converters.