Abstract

Traditional optical pulse stretcher/compressor systems rely on the use of parallel grating pairs which introduce a dispersive delay on the beam path [1], The operation of this device suffers from intrinsic nonlinearities of the time delay as a function of the optical frequency. We report here the first experimental results obtained with a pair of perpendicular chirped gratings introduced recently by P. TOURNOIS [2], Each of the grating has a chirped spatial frequency and the pair provides a strictly linear variation of the group delay t_R versus the optical frequency; ${\text{t}}_{\text{R}}=\frac{\Lambda \text{d}}{{\text{c}}^2}\times \text{f}$ where Λ is the local grating period, d = OM (see fig. 1-a). In the chirped gratings the product Λd is a constant.

© 1995 Optical Society of America