Generalized temporal synthesis method for a birefringent laser pulse shaper

Abstract

We propose a new method for the synthesis of arbitrary temporal output pulse profiles by using a birefringent laser pulse shaper. This shaper contains a series of N birefringent crystals placed between input and output polarizers. The synthesis method starts with the linear time-invariant system theory to determine the optimal amplitudes of the replica pulses at the output polarizer and the time delay between them, and then uses the temporal Jones matrix formalism to obtain the angle of each crystal. The design procedure is demonstrated for an eight-stage birefringent laser pulse shaper. Several examples of predefined output pulse profiles are given to show the potential of the proposed birefringent laser pulse shaper.

Tunable All-Optical System for Time-to-Frequency Mapping by Parabolic Cross-Phase Modulation in the Spectral Fraunhofer Regime

“…Optical pulses with parabolic temporal intensity profiles have gotten much interest for a variety of applications, starting from high-power ultrashort pulse generation to optical nonlinear signal processing [7][8][9][10]. These parabolic pump pulses can be generated with different durations ranging from the sub-picosecond to a few tens of picoseconds by linear or nonlinear pulse shaping techniques [11][12][13] and birefringent filters [14][15]. Since it is well known that parabolic XPM can induce quadratic phase modulation on a probe pulse [16], many works based on XPM have been done in the last three decades in order to eliminate optical pulse degradation [17][18][19], spectral compression [20], and real-time temporal measurement of femtosecond pulses [21].…”