Adaptive pulse compression of femtosecond laser pulses using a low-loss pulse shaper

Abstract

A simple low-loss pulse shaper, employing a micromachined deformable mirror and a Brewster-cut prism, is demonstrated for the adaptive compression of femtosecond laser pulses. Using this pulse shaper, we compress a positively chirped 84 fs pulse down to 23 fs and compensate for the high-order phase distortion of a sub-10-fs laser pulse. The transmission efficiency of the pulse shaper reaches 93% with dielectric mirrors and 85% with gold-coated mirrors, designed for broad spectrum application.