Abstract

There are more and more applications in ultrafast optics of the analogies between spatial properties and their temporal counterpart. This has led for instance to the concept of “time lens," which is deduced by applying the correspondence between respectively diffraction and dispersion, and lenses and phase modulators.¹ One practical application is the measurements of ultrashort pulse temporal profiles.^2,3 However, these methods, which rely on phase modulators, are restricted to pulses above 1 or a few picoseconds in duration because of the limitation of the phase modulation to a frequency of a few GHz and an amplitude of only a few times 2π. In the following, we analyse the use of such schemes in order to control the phase distortions that appears in the technique of Chirped Pulse Amplification (CPA).

© 1994 IEEE