A pulse picker is an electrically controlled optical switch used to extract single pulses from a fast pulse train. Short and Ultrashort pulses are in most cases generated by a mode-locked laser in the form of a pulse train with a pulse repetition rate of the order of 10 MHz – few GHz. For various reasons, it is often necessary to pick certain pulses from such a pulse train, i.e., to transmit only certain pulses and block all the others. This can be done with a pulse picker, which is essentially an electrically controlled optical gate.
