Miniature pulse compressor of deep-etched gratings

Abstract

We propose a miniature pulse compressor that can be used to compensate the group velocity dispersion that is produced by a commercial femtosecond laser cavity. The compressor is composed of two identical highly efficient deep-etched transmissive gratings. Compared with prism pairs, highly efficient deep-etched transmissive grating pairs are lightweight and small. With an optimized groove depth and a duty cycle, 98% diffraction efficiency of the -1 transmissive order can be achieved at a wavelength of 800 nm under Littrow conditions. The deep-etched gratings are fabricated in fused silica by inductively coupled plasma etching. With a pair of the fabricated gratings, the input positively chirped 73.9 fs pulses are neatly compressed into the nearly Fourier transform-limited 43.2 fs pulses. The miniature deep-etched grating-based pulse compressor should be of interest for practical applications.

Unified design of sinusoidal-groove fused-silica grating

“…A high-efficiency grating has many applications, e.g., it is a useful device in a dense wavelength division multiplexing system [11], and it can be used to comprise a miniature femtosecond pulse compressor [20,21]. The modal method can also be used as a guideline for design of this kind of grating.…”

A reflective surface-relief two-layer grating for splitting beams with the polarization-selective property

“…On the one hand, high-efficiency diffraction can be useful for high-power laser systems [8]. Two identical transmissive gratings have been optimized with high efficiency in the −1st order by using rigorous coupled-wave analysis (RCWA) [9], which can compress the incident positively chirped 73.9 fs pulses into the nearly Fourier transform-limited 43.2 fs pulses [10]. With the presented grating pairs, the size of the cavity can be reduced to obtain compact pulse compressor.…”

Multireflection modal method for wideband fused-silica transmission gratings

“…Diffraction gratings play an important role in chirped pulse amplification technologies [1,2], where they are always exposed to extreme conditions because of the high energy intensity of laser systems. Metallic reflection gratings and all-dielectric gratings are the most commonly used gratings as pulse compressors.…”