Miniature pulse compressor of deep-etched gratings.
We propose a miniature pulse compressor that can be used to compensate the group velocity dispersion that is produced by a commercial femtosecond laser cavity. The compressor is composed of two identical highly efficient deep-etched transmissive gratings. Compared with prism pairs, highly efficient deep-etched transmissive grating pairs are lightweight and small. With an optimized groove depth and a duty cycle, 98% diffraction efficiency of the -1 transmissive order can be achieved at a wavelength of 800 nm under Littrow conditions. The deep-etched gratings are fabricated in fused silica by inductively coupled plasma etching. With a pair of the fabricated gratings, the input positively chirped 73.9 fs pulses are neatly compressed into the nearly Fourier transform-limited 43.2 fs pulses. The miniature deep-etched grating-based pulse compressor should be of interest for practical applications.
Jia
Wei
W
Information Optics Laboratory Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics, Academia Sinica, P. O. Box 800-211, Shanghai 201800, China.
Zhou
Changhe
C
Feng
Jijun
J
Dai
Enwen
E
D000465:Algorithms; D004867:Equipment Design; D007834:Lasers; D016011:Normal Distribution; D055095:Optics and Photonics; D017785:Photons; D010825:Physics / Q000379:methods; D013997:Time Factors