Programmable dispersion compensation and pulse shaping in a 26-fs chirped-pulse amplifier.

We have constructed a 26-fs chirped-pulse amplifier that incorporates a programmable liquid-crystal spatial light modulator in the pulse stretcher. The modulator serves a dual purpose. First, we apply frequency-dependent phase shifts to compensate for cubic, quartic, and nonlinear phase dispersion in the amplifier, which results in a reduction in pulse duration from 32 to 26 fs, in agreement with the transform limit of the amplified pulse spectrum. Second, we are able to produce high-fidelity compressed amplified shaped pulses by applying phase masks directly within the stretcher. Shaped pulse energies of greater than 1 mJ are routinely obtained.

[1]  W. White,et al.  Phase control for production of high-fidelity optical pulses for chirped-pulse amplification. , 1995, Optics letters.

[2]  Warren S. Warren,et al.  High-resolution acousto-optic shaping of unamplified and amplified femtosecond laser pulses , 1997 .

[3]  G. Wiederrecht,et al.  Femtosecond Pulse Sequences Used for Optical Manipulation of Molecular Motion , 1990, Science.

[4]  Andrew M. Weiner,et al.  High-resolution femtosecond pulse shaping , 1988 .

[5]  M M Murnane,et al.  0.2-TW laser system at 1kHz. , 1997, Optics letters.

[6]  Umstadter,et al.  Nonlinear plasma waves resonantly driven by optimized laser pulse trains. , 1994, Physical review letters.

[7]  Andrew M. Weiner,et al.  Programmable shaping of femtosecond optical pulses by use of 128-element liquid crystal phase modulator , 1992 .

[8]  A. Weiner,et al.  Dispersion-free fiber transmission for femtosecond pulses by use of a dispersion-compensating fiber and a programmable pulse shaper. , 1998, Optics letters.

[9]  C. Barty,et al.  Generation of 16-fs, 10-TW pulses at a 10-Hz repetition rate with efficient Ti:sapphire amplifiers. , 1998, Optics letters.

[10]  A. Weiner,et al.  Generation of terahertz-rate trains of femtosecond pulses by phase-only filtering. , 1990, Optics Letters.

[11]  Schumacher,et al.  Programmable cesium Rydberg wave packets. , 1995, Physical review. A, Atomic, molecular, and optical physics.

[12]  Keith A. Nelson,et al.  Analysis of programmable ultrashort waveform generation using liquid-crystal spatial light modulators , 1995 .

[13]  F. Krausz,et al.  Sub-20-fs, kilohertz-repetition-rate Ti:sapphire amplifier. , 1995, Optics letters.

[14]  T. Norris,et al.  Compensation of self-phase modulation in chirped-pulse amplification laser systems. , 1997, Optics letters.

[15]  David H. Reitze,et al.  Programmable shaping of ultrabroad-bandwidth pulses from a Ti:sapphire laser , 1995 .

[16]  Anatoly Efimov,et al.  Spectral adaptive optics: phase compensation for ultrashort chirped pulse amplifier systems , 1996, Photonics West.