Pulse compression by use of deformable mirrors

Abstract

An electrostatically deformable, gold-coated, silicon nitride membrane mirror was used as a phase modulator to compress pulses from 92 to 15 fs. Both an iterative genetic algorithm and single-step dispersion compensation based on frequency-resolved optical gating calibration of the mirror were used to compress pulses to within 10% of the transform limit. Frequency-resolved optical gating was used to characterize the pulses and to test the range of the deformable-mirror-based compressor.

Innovative Membrane Deformable Mirrors

“…In fact, as reported by Brida et al, 2010, using DM's is the optimal way to manipulate the broadband radiation coming from an ultrabroadband OPA: it has been shown (see for example Zeek et al, 1999 that the use of a DM as spectral phase modulator has significant advantages with respect to acousto-optics modulators and liquid crystals, as for example high efficiency and achromaticity, at the expenses of a slightly smaller resolution.…”

Efficient broadband highly dispersive HfO_2/SiO_2 multilayer mirror for pulse compression in near ultraviolet

“…However, achieving sub-10 fs pulses requires special treatment to avoid spatial-and mode-distortion [11] and precise prism matching to guarantee compensation of the third order dispersion. Conventional pulse shapers [12] applicable to UV include micro mirrors (MEMS), deformable mirrors [13] or acousto-optic programmable dispersive filters (AOPDF) [14]. However, deformable mirrors and MEMS are limited by the maximum amplitude of the deformation [13], while AOPDF is doomed by rather low efficiency in UV (about 20% for 30 fs pulse in case of AOPDF [10]), though all provide unprecedented flexibility for pulse shaping.…”

Analytical solutions for the electromagnetic fields of tightly focused laser beams of arbitrary pulse length

“…1 Research is ongoing on many fronts to generate ultrashort, high-energy beams, including through compression by ionization, 2 Raman amplification, 3 filamentation, 4 dielectric reflectors, 5 hollow-core fibers, 6 and even deformable mirrors. 7 Such ultrashort laser pulses find application in many areas of current interest, including the acceleration of high-energy, monoenergetic electrons, the generation of attosecond pulses, and photoionization. [8][9][10][11] In this Letter the recently published solution for focused laser fields is used to develop an exact analytical solution to the vacuum Maxwell wave equation for tightly focused laser beams of arbitrary pulse length.…”