Abstract

The temporal shape of compressed picosecond pulses may be controlled through amplitude and phase apodization of the pulse’s frequency spectrum which is spatially dispersed within a grating pulse compressor.^1–2 Essentially arbitrary pulse shapes may be fabricated, subject to the limitations imposed by finite bandwidth and resolution. Our experiments are performed with pulses from a cw mode-locked Nd:YAG laser, compressed from 80 ps down to 0.9 ps, using self-phase modulation in a single-mode optical fiber and compression with a grating pair. Undesirable energy in the wings of the compressed pulses has been eliminated, with no concomitant pulse broadening, by means of a spectral windowing technique.¹ Furthermore, by masking the amplitude and/or phase of the spatially dispersed frequency components within the compressor, we have synthesized a variety of pulse types, such as bursts of picosecond pulses, odd pulses, bursts of odd pulses, and square pulses.² In this paper we describe our recent progress in the generation of novel ultrashort pulse shapes, and we discuss the application of phase and amplitude masking for picosecond code generation.

© 1985 Optical Society of America