A compact pulse stretcher using curved diffraction gratings is present
ed. It introduces positive group-delay dispersion and can operate in c
onjunction with a standard grating-pair compressor in chirped-pulse am
plification systems. It presents several advantages over other systems
proposed: It has no degrees of freedom and so is not highly sensitive
to alignment errors, it is easy to align, it has a compact and robust
design parameters of the stretcher-compressor system that will yield
good matching are analyzed. Examples of design specifications for a 40
-fs pulse with a central wavelength of lambda = 800 nm are given. (C)
1997 Optical Society of America.