Smooth dispersion compensation: novel chirped mirrors with suppressed dispersion oscillations

We present a novel design approach for chirped mirror dispersion compensation, suitable for octave-filling spectra with strongly reduced dispersion oscillations. This method is experimentally demonstrated on a mode-locked Ti:sapphire laser. From the full amplitude and phase characterization of the resulting ultrabroadband pulses, we obtained a full width at half maximum duration of 5.8 fs.