Volume-chirped Bragg gratings: monolithic components for stretching and compression of ultrashort laser pulses

Leonid B. Glebov; Vadim Smirnov; Eugeniu Rotari; Ion Cohanoschi; Larissa Glebova; Oleg V. Smolski; Julien Lumeau; Christopher Lantigua; Alexei Glebov

doi:10.1117/1.OE.53.5.051514

6 February 2014 Volume-chirped Bragg gratings: monolithic components for stretching and compression of ultrashort laser pulses

Leonid B. Glebov, Vadim Smirnov, Eugeniu Rotari, Ion Cohanoschi, Larissa Glebova, Oleg V. Smolski, Julien Lumeau, Christopher Lantigua, Alexei Glebov

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Optical Engineering, Vol. 53, Issue 5, 051514 (February 2014). https://doi.org/10.1117/1.OE.53.5.051514

Abstract

An innovative type of optical component—a volume Bragg grating—has recently become available commercially and has found wide applications in optics and photonics due to its unusually fine spectral and angular filtering capability. Reflecting volume Bragg gratings, with the grating period gradually changing along the beam propagation direction (chirped Bragg gratings—CBGs) provide stretching and recompression of ultrashort laser pulses. CBGs, being monolithic, are robust devices that have a footprint three orders of magnitude smaller than that of a conventional Treacy compressor. CBGs recorded in photo-thermo-refractive glass can be used in the spectral range from 0.8 to 2.5 μm with the diffraction efficiency exceeding 90%, and provide stretching up to 1 ns and compression down to 200 fs for pulses with energies and average powers exceeding 1 mJ and 250 W, respectively, while keeping the recompressed beam quality M² <1.4 , and possibly as low as 1.1. This paper discusses fundamentals of stretching and compression by CBGs, the main parameters of the gratings including the CBG effects on the laser beam quality, and currently achievable CBG specifications.

CC BY: © The Authors. Published by SPIE under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported License. Distribution or reproduction of this work in whole or in part requires full attribution of the original publication, including its DOI.

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Leonid B. Glebov, Vadim Smirnov, Eugeniu Rotari, Ion Cohanoschi, Larissa Glebova, Oleg V. Smolski, Julien Lumeau, Christopher Lantigua, and Alexei Glebov "Volume-chirped Bragg gratings: monolithic components for stretching and compression of ultrashort laser pulses," Optical Engineering 53(5), 051514 (6 February 2014). https://doi.org/10.1117/1.OE.53.5.051514

Published: 6 February 2014

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