Abstract

In chirped-pulse amplification (CPA) lasers, pulses are temporally stretched by a factor of ~10³, and to achieve good pulse compression it is necessary that the dispersion of the compressor match that of the stretcher. The original CPA lasers used a single-mode fiber to stretch and a grating pair to compress; however, the mismatch In third-order dispersion between the fiber and the grating made subpicosecond compression impossible.¹ The fiber stretcher was abandoned in favor of the more complicated grating-pair stretcher, which more closely matched the dispersion of the grating compressor.

© 1996 Optical Society of America