Diffractive optics for quasi-direct space-to-time pulse shaping

摘要

The strong chromatic behavior associated with a conventionaldiffractive lens is fully exploited to propose a novel optical device for pulseshaping in the femtosecond regime. This device consists of two opticalelements: a spatially patterned circularly symmetric mask and a kinoformdiffractive lens, which are facing each other. The system performs amapping between the spatial position of the masking function expressed inthe squared radial coordinate and the temporal position in the outputwaveform. This space-to-time conversion occurs at the chromatic focus ofthe diffractive lens, and makes it possible to tailor the output centralwavelength along the axial location of the output point. Inspection of thevalidity of our device is performed by means of computer simulationsinvolving the generation of femtosecond optical packets