Abstract

The effect of aberrations on the focusing of ultrashort pulses by a perfectly conducting spherical mirror, which is a dispersionless system, is presented in this paper by using the Seidel aberration theory. We have removed the approximation which assumes that the bandwidth is smaller than the carrier frequency of the pulse, i.e, $\frac{\Delta \omega }{{\omega }_0}\ll 1$, for the calculation of the phase change introduced by aberrations. We show that when this approximation is removed, the monochromatic aberrations do change the pulse duration at the focal point for pulses shorter than 20fs@810nm under homogeneous illumination.

© 2017 Optical Society of America