COMPACT CURVED-GRATING STRETCHER FOR LASER-PULSE AMPLIFICATION

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.