Pulse-Shaping Techniques Theory and Experimental Implementations for Femtosecond Pulses

Femtosecond pulses are used in many fields due to their specificities of extreme short duration, ultra high peak power or large spectral bandwidth. Since the early days of the laser in the 60s, there has been a continous quest to generate shorter and or higher peak power pulses. Reliable generation of pulses below 100fs occurred the first time in 1981 with the invention of the colliding pulse modelocked (CPM) ring dye laser (Fork R.L. and al., 1981). Despite relative low energy per pulses, the ultrashort pulse duration leads to peak power large enough for non linear pulse compression culminating in pulses as short as 6fs in the visible. Recent advances in laser technology as the use of solid-state gain media, laser diode pumping, fiber laser, have led to simple, reliable, turn key ultrashort laser oscillators with pulse duration ranging form few ps down to 5fs. Limitation to pulse energy in the range of a microJoule or less in the CPM laser has been overcomed by the Chirped Pulse Amplification (CPA) technique (Strickland D., Mourou G., (1985)). This technique is the optical transposition of a Radar technique developped during the second world war. The basic principle is to spread in time i.e to stretch the ultrashort pulse before amplification. Indeed limitation of the pulse amplification because of the damage threshold of the optics is mainly due to the pulse peak power. A stretch ratio of a million gives the ability to amplify the stretched pulse, without optical damage, by a factor of a million from less than a microJoule to more than a Joule per pulse. After amplification, recompression of the pulse is achieved by an optical set-up that has a very high damage threshold. To obtain the highest peak power, the pulse duration has to be “Fourier transform limited”, ie its spectral phase is purely linear. The compensation of the chirp and higher spectral phase order is highly simplified by the ability to introduced an arbitrarly shaped spectral phase. Application of these ultrashort pulses requires to control of optimize their temporal shape. Dispersion of materials and optical devices has been used to compress, stretch or replicate the pulses. Limitations on the ability to control the pulse temporal shape by classical optical devices have lead to the development of arbitrary pulse shapers. These devices are linear Source: Advances in Solid-State Lasers: Development and Applications, Book edited by: Mikhail Grishin, ISBN 978-953-7619-80-0, pp. 630, February 2010, INTECH, Croatia, downloaded from SCIYO.COM