Abstract

A diffraction grating is one of the most commonly used components in ultrafast optical systems such as pulse stretchers and compressors. Hence, modeling the temporal dispersion and spatiotemporal distortions associated with the angular dispersion of a diffraction grating is very crucial for wave optical modeling of such systems. In this paper, the Gaussian pulsed beam decomposition (GPBD) method is extended to handle the propagation of ultrashort pulses, with arbitrary spatial and spectral profiles, through complex ultrashort pulse shaping systems containing diffraction gratings. Although the diffraction efficiencies are not rigorously computed, the GPBD method enables modeling of the large angular dispersion of idealized diffraction gratings without running into an impractically large number of spectral samples as in the case of Fourier-transform-based methods. The application of the extended method is demonstrated by performing the wave optical propagation of an ultrashort pulse through a single diffraction grating and then through a Treacy compressor system. By combining the Treacy compressor with the Martinez grating pair stretcher with internal lenses, the pulse shaping through a complete chirped pulse amplification (CPA) setup is modeled. Finally, the effects of using real dispersive lenses in the Martinez stretcher on the output pulse of the CPA setup are presented. For analysis of the output pulses, methods of computing the spatiotemporal and spatio-spectral amplitudes of the output pulse from the phase correct superposition of individual Gaussian pulsed beams are presented.

© 2020 Optical Society of America

Gaussian pulsed beam decomposition for propagation of ultrashort pulses through optical systems

Norman G. Worku and Herbert Gross
J. Opt. Soc. Am. A 37(1) 98-107 (2020)

Spatially truncated Gaussian pulsed beam and its application in modeling diffraction of ultrashort pulses from hard apertures

Norman G. Worku and Herbert Gross
J. Opt. Soc. Am. A 37(2) 317-326 (2020)

Seidel aberrations in grating pulse stretchers

Štěpán Vyhlídka, Daniel Kramer, Galina Kalinchenko, and Bedřich Rus
Opt. Express 24(26) 30421-30432 (2016)

Propagation of truncated Gaussian beams and their application in modeling sharp-edge diffraction

Norman G. Worku and Herbert Gross
J. Opt. Soc. Am. A 36(5) 859-868 (2019)

Tautochronism principle and grating dispersive delay lines

Andrey Gitin
Appl. Opt. 51(1) 27-32 (2012)