Single grism pulse compressor

Vikrant Chauhan; Pamela Bowlan; Edward Miesak; Steve Kane; Rick Trebino

doi:10.1117/12.809184

24 February 2009 Single grism pulse compressor

Vikrant Chauhan, Pamela Bowlan, Edward Miesak, Steve Kane, Rick Trebino

Proceedings Volume 7203, Commercial and Biomedical Applications of Ultrafast Lasers IX; 72030Z (2009) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.809184
Event: SPIE LASE: Lasers and Applications in Science and Engineering, 2009, San Jose, California, United States

Abstract

We introduce a simple, compact, and automatically distortion-free single-grism pulse compressor that can compensate for large amounts of material dispersion in ultrashort pulses, which increases the pulse duration and decreases the peak intensity. Diffraction-grating pulse compressors can compensate for high dispersion, but they do not compensate for higher-order dispersion (important when GDD is large). Worse, all previous general-purpose grating designs have involved multiple gratings and so are also difficult to align and prone to distortions: small misalignments cause unwanted spatio-temporal pulse distortions. A compressor based on grisms solves the higher-order-dispersion problem because grisms allow the ratio of third-order to second-order dispersion to be tuned to match that of the material that introduced the GDD. A grism can also compensate for large amounts of dispersion. Unfortunately, previous grism compressors used multiple grisms and so are difficult to align and prone to spatio-temporal distortions. To overcome this problem, we introduce a single-grism compressor. It comprises only three elements: a reflection grism, a corner cube, and a roof mirror. SEA TADPOLE measured the compressor GDD and third-order dispersion, verifying its operation. This convenient device should be a valuable general tool.

Citation Download Citation

Vikrant Chauhan, Pamela Bowlan, Edward Miesak, Steve Kane, and Rick Trebino "Single grism pulse compressor", Proc. SPIE 7203, Commercial and Biomedical Applications of Ultrafast Lasers IX, 72030Z (24 February 2009); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.809184

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