Spatiotemporal aberrations due to the groove density mismatching of compression gratings in ultra-intense femtosecond lasers

Abstract

The groove density mismatching of compression gratings, an often-neglected key issue, can induce significant spatiotemporal aberrations especially for super-intense femtosecond lasers. We mainly investigate the angular chirp and the consequent degradation of the effective focused intensity introduced by the groove density mismatching of compression gratings in ultra-intense femtosecond lasers. The results indicate that the tolerances of grating groove density mismatching will rapidly decrease with the beam aperture or spectral bandwidth increases. For our 100PW laser under construction, the grating groove density mismatching should be as small as 0.001 gr/mm if the drop of effective focused intensity has to be controlled below 15%. More importantly, new angular chirp compensation schemes are proposed for both double-grating and four-grating compressors. This work reveals the importance of groove density matching of compression gratings, and can provide helpful guidelines for the design of ultra-intense femtosecond lasers.