Spatio-temporal metrology of high-power femtosecond lasers

Abstract

Nowadays, high-power femtosecond lasers are commonly used to accelerate particles or to generate attosecond pulses. The high technical complexity of such systems makes them very sensitive to any implementation defect, as for instance optical misalignments. In the field of ultrashort pulses, a common type of defect is spatio-temporal coupling, which is described as a time-dependency of a spatial characteristic of the beam. Such couplings affect both the beam spatial quality and the pulse duration at focus and can thus significantly reduce the laser peak power.