Frankfurt 2006 – scientific programme
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Q: Quantenoptik und Photonik
Q 27: Erzeugung ultrakurzer Lichtimpulse
Q 27.2: Talk
Tuesday, March 14, 2006, 14:00–14:15, HIV
Brewster-angle chirped mirrors for broadband pulse compression without dispersion oscillations — •Markus Breuer1, Peter Baum1, Eberhard Riedle1, and Günter Steinmeyer2 — 1Lehrstuhl für BioMolekulare Optik, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, München — 2Max-Born-Institut (MBI), Berlin
Wideband dispersion compensation is the key to compression of few-cycle pulses. Adaptive schemes were recently used to generate pulses as short as 3.4 fs, however, they are quite complex, substantial losses are induced by the gratings, and due to spatio-spectral coupling severe distortions can occur when focusing the beam. Static approaches such as chirped mirrors (CMs) offer a similar bandwidth. When approaching the optical octave, dispersion ripple becomes a plaguing problem of CMs, chiefly arising from a spurious reflection at the interface between mirror stack and air. Recently, orientation of the CM stack at Brewster’s angle has been proposed for the suppression of dispersion oscillations [1]. Here we demonstrate such novel CMs for the first time experimentally, leading to an unprecedented 270-THz spectral coverage throughout the visible with negligible dispersion ripple. With these novel CMs we generate extremely clean 5.6-fs pulses from a noncollinear optical parametric amplifier (NOPA). The mirrors (58 alternating SiO2/TiO2 layers) are designed to compensate the higher order phase errors that remain in the prism based compression. In further experiments, we demonstrate the generation of tunable pulses with a duration ranging from 8 to 15 fs over the wavelength range from 665 to 500 nm.
[1] G. Steinmeyer, Opt. Express 11, 2358 (2003).