Synthesis and manufacturing the mirrors for ultrafast optics

Plasma-ion-assisted coatings for 15 femtosecond laser systems

“…A primary challenge for the production of coatings for fs applications remains the deposition of such coatings for large-aperture applications, given that most fs coatings are produced by ion-beam or magnetron sputtering [16,[25][26][27]. Precision deposition for large-area coatings is generally performed by electron-beam evaporation as a result of the relative ease of scaling the coating process; while some fs coatings have been demonstrated using evaporation processes, low-dispersion, high-damage-threshold coatings suitable for use in a meter-class laser systems have not been thoroughly investigated [28,29].…”

Comparison of dispersive mirrors based on the time-domain and conventional approaches, for sub-5-fs pulses

“…All DMs were previously been designed on the basis of "phase" targets, i.e. optimized (minimized difference between the target and calculated dispersions) in respect of the phase or its frequency derivative, the group delay (GD) and the group delay dispersion (GDD) [6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19]. Phase-targeted designs will provide pulses with durations closer to a Fourier transform limited pulse (FTLP) when one has smaller differences in the phase characteristic between the design and target values.…”

“…In theoretical studies, the record for the shortest output pulse was obtained by the original phase complementary approach [7], in which compression to 2 fs is reported. There are now several types of DMs which can be designed by means of phase targets: i) complementary pair [7,[9][10][11][12], ii) Brewster angle DM [13,14], iii) double DM [15][16][17], iv) back-side coated DM [18] v) tilted-front-interface DM [19].…”

“…In this work we employ and compare a new method of designing DMs on the basis of a time-domain approach [20,21], in which the final pulse duration and energy concentration are optimized [21] rather than the phase shift imposed on the reflected pulse by the DM, as close in previous approaches [7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19]. The theoretical and experimental performances of DM designs optimized by the time-domain and phase approaches are reported.…”

Dispersion Compensation Devices

“…Although the ripples can be minimized by the optimization procedure such as with commercially available software, it is difficult to reduce the ripples to acceptable level when the design of a single chirped mirror has to operate over the wavelength ranges up to an octave spanning or more. Therefore, several other approaches to reduce GDD ripples have been proposed, such as double-chirped mirrors (Kärtner et al 1997;Matuschek et al 1998;Kärtner et al 2001), complementary CM pairs (Pervak et al 2005;Pervak et al 2007). By pairing the CMs, the dispersion ripples of CMs are opposite to each other.…”