Abstract

With modern applications of high-resolution and flexible spatial domain beam shaping of ultrashort, intense and spectrally ultra-broad laser pulses for temporal pulse synthesizing, coherent control, adaptive phase correction, nonlinear spectroscopy, biochemistry, particle manipulation or ultrafast information processing, new and challenging requirements on spatial light modulators (SLMs) arise. In particular, ultrashort wavepackets have to be transferred with minimum distortion, two-dimensionally structuring has to be performed at high spatial resolution, phase patterns should be programmable in linear mode (minimum spectral amplitude changes) and high damage thresholds enabling to implement the devices in systems with amplified femtosecond pulses. Recently we demonstrated that selected types of liquid-crystal-on-silicon SLMs (LCoS-SLMs) are well matching these requirements [1]. Here we present experimental results on shaping non-uniform arrays of microscopic-sized beams from few-cycle laser pulses with such LCoS-SLMs.

© 2009 IEEE