NONLINEAR TEMPORAL DIFFRACTION AND FREQUENCY-SHIFTS RESULTING FROM PULSE SHAPING IN CHIRPED-PULSE AMPLIFICATION SYSTEMS

We present experimental results of the amplification of strongly ampli tude-modulated chirped pulses resulting from the coherent addition of two delayed short pulses. The nonlinearities in the amplifier chain in duce a temporal diffraction resulting in prepulses and postpulses, in addition to the two main pulses when compressed. Simultaneously, tempo ral-resolved and spectral-resolved output pulses show that the prepuls es and postpulses are blue shifted and red shifted, respectively, expl aining the causality of the system.