Dispersion compensation by a liquid lens (DisCoBALL).

Abstract

We present dispersion compensation by a liquid lens (DisCoBALL), which provides tunable group-delay dispersion (GDD) that is high speed, has a large tuning range, and uses off-the-shelf components. GDD compensation is crucial for experiments with ultrashort pulses. With an electrically tunable lens (ETL) at the Fourier plane of a 4f grating pair pulse shaper, the ETL applies a parabolic phase shift in space and therefore a parabolic phase shift to the laser spectrum, i.e., GDD. The GDD can be tuned with a range greater than 2×105 fs2 at a rate of 100Hz while maintaining stable coupling into a single-mode fiber.