Abstract

With the progress in the development of lasers emitting pulses of 10-fs duration¹ and their application, there is an increasing demand to analyze corresponding focusing optics. Another motivation for those studies results from the need to focus extremely powerful fs pulses when the beam diameters and the corresponding apertures are large. Chromatic aberration turned out to prevent diffraction-limited focusing² and introducing a radius-dependent arrival time in the focal plane.³ It could be characterized by a parameter τ representing the (maximum) delay between pulses arriving at the focal plane from the lens rim and center.

© 1993 Optical Society of America