Abstract
The 35-fs-long pulses of a commercial Ti:sapphire amplifier are compressed to ∼20fs via self-phase modulation in bulk glass substrates. The cascading of both nonlinear broadening and dispersion compensation stages makes use of the increasing peak power in the successive nonlinear stages. As an application example, the compressed pulses are used for electro-optical sampling of terahertz waves created by optically pumped thin-film spin emitters.
Highlights
Ultrafast laser systems with mJ-level pulse energy are widely used and commercially available
We report on the implementation of a simple and compact pulse compression setup, based on successive spectral broadening and dispersion compensation stages
The spectral width amounted to 27 nm (FWHM) and the duration was minimized to 44 fs (FWHM) at the entrance of the pulse compression setup after the optimization of the laser compressor, partly compensating for the dispersion introduced by the half-wave plates; for reference, the minimum pulse duration achievable at the laser output, close to Fourier transform limit, was 38 fs
Summary
Ultrafast laser systems with mJ-level pulse energy are widely used and commercially available. Many applications though require shorter pulse duration or larger spectral width. Electro-optical sampling (EOS) is one such application; it results in a convolution between the probe pulse and the waveform to sample. Pulses as short as possible are desired to reduce this averaging effect and acquire data accurately. One such example is the sampling of terahertz (THz) waveforms of sub-picosecond duration: a single cycle of 3 THz or 10 THz frequency lasts 333 fs or 100 fs, respectively. We report on the implementation of a simple and compact pulse compression setup, based on successive spectral broadening and dispersion compensation stages. The setup is optimized once for shortest pulse duration and once for daily reproducibility. We conclude by describing the application of these shortened pulses
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