Angle-matching of chirped mirror designs for low dispersion ripple and ultrawide compensation bandwidth

摘要

Nowadays, chirped mirrors are routinely used for dispersion compensation in commercially available lasers. Featuring compensation of arbitrarily shaped higher-order dispersion, chirped mirrors have widely replaced prism and grating combinations in the sub-10-fs regime. State-of-the-art design approaches such as the double-chirped mirror [1] allow for dispersion compensation up to 2/3 of an optical octave. Further progress towards even wider bandwidths is mainly limited by dispersion ripple, i.e. a modulation of dispersion vs. wavelength. This ripple causes a degradation of the compressed pulse shape. Extending compensation bandwidth without sacrificing pulse contrast is one of the main goals in ultrafast research. Here we present a novel approach to this problem, combining octave bandwidth with low dispersion ripple, which may be particularly useful for the compression of white-light continua.