New aspects of temporal dispersion in high-resolution Fourier pulse shaping: a quantitative description with virtually imaged phased array pulse shapers

摘要

We report new aspects of temporal dispersion in Fourier pulse shapers whichcontain spectral dispersers with a nonlinear frequency to space mapping. Theseeffects are particularly important in high resolution operation since highresolution dispersers typically exhibit pronounced nonlinear angular dispersionover relatively small bandwidths. In this paper we present a general discussionof the new effects followed by quantitative analysis and experimentalverification for pulse shapers which utilize a virtually imaged phased array(VIPA) as the spectral disperser. Compared to the well known 4f configuration,our results demonstrate a substantial modification to the placement of theoptical components required to obtain zero temporal dispersion. Furthermore,spectral phase variations associated with nonzero dispersion coupled withcontributions from multiple diffraction orders are shown to give rise to adramatic new spectral interference effect, which can be used to monitortemporal dispersion purely in the spectral domain. We expect the effects wepresent in this paper to become prominent even for more conventionaldiffraction grating based pulse shapers for bandwidths sufficiently large thatnonlinear spectral mapping becomes strong.