title: Miniature pulse compressor of deep-etched gratings.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: Information Optics Laboratory Shanghai Institute of Optics and Fine Mechanics, Academia Sinica, P. O. Box 800-211, Shanghai 201800, China.
authors.forename: Wei
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Jia
authors.forename: Changhe
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Zhou
authors.forename: Jijun
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Feng
authors.forename: Enwen
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Dai
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D004867:Equipment Design; D007834:Lasers; D016011:Normal Distribution; D055095:Optics and Photonics; D017785:Photons; D010825:Physics / Q000379:methods; D013997:Time Factors