Pulse compression to 14 fs by third-order dispersion control in a hybrid grating-prism compressor

Abstract

A pulse compressor consisting of a fiber and a compact hybrid grating-prism dispersive delay line (DDL) is used to compress readily-available 140-fs pulses from a Ti:sapphire laser. We generate broadband pulses of up to 75 THz FWHM bandwidth in normally-dispersive single-mode conventional and photonic crystal fibers, with a potential of compression to 6 fs. Pulse dechirping in our hybrid DDL through second- and third-order dispersion (TOD) compensation results in 10× compression to 14 fs, limited by the bandwidth of the DDL transfer function and higher-order dispersion. The large tunability of the TOD of the hybrid DDL is shown.