Design of an adaptive compressor and pulse-shaper for attosecond XUV pulses

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Different schemes are known, based on the nonlinear interaction of few-femtosecond laser pulses in the near or mid infrared with gas or solid targets. As a general feature, the mechanisms exploited so far generate attosecond pulses which are not at their transform limited duration. This put forward need to correct the spectral phase of the pulse while keeping a fairly good transmittance, as the pulses are generally weak. The design of a compressor for attosecond XUV pulses (XAC) has been recently introduced , extending the concept of the compensated monochromator and aimed to provide either a positive or a negative group delay dispersion (GDD), which is tunable through the grating separation. It was demonstrated, that the XUV pulses can be compressed not far from their Fourier limit. The XAC design provide for an intermediate focal plane (IFP) where the pulse is spectrally dispersed, allowing for spectral phase manipulation. Inserting an adaptive optical component at the IFP provides a flexible control of the pulse spectral phase for compression as well as pulse shaping. In this work we test the applicability of this adaptive pulse shaper on high-order harmonic attosecond pulses calculated in the strong field approximation using the saddlepoint method . We also compare the compression achievable with XAC to that results obtained with metallic filters.