All-optical temporal shaping of nanosecond pulses with picosecond accuracy using adapted chirps and quadratic nonlinearities

Abstract

Summary form only given. Precise temporal pulse shaping of optical pulses has become increasingly important in laser-matter interaction and applications. This is true at the femtosecond time scale for coherent control experiments as well as in the nanosecond time scale with inertial confinement fusion applications. In the latter case few nanosecond pulses must be shaped with a plateau and subsequent structures having tens of picoseconds rises. But it is also important that the pulse spectrum stays bandwidth limited in order to limit dispersion and optimize the amplification and the frequency conversion. We have reached this goal by applying our concept of adapted phase-matching, which previously allowed us to efficiently generate the ultrashort third harmonic or narrow bandwidth second harmonic pulses starting from femtosecond pulses.