Independent control of arbitrary orders of dispersion at the high power end of CPA lasers

Complete text of publication follows. One of the most crucial issues in chirped pulse amplification (CPA) systems is the precise temporal recompression of the pulses hitting the target. In case of few cycle high intensity lasers, the stabilization of the carrier-envelope phase (CEP) of the pulses is also required. An acousto-optical programmable dispersion filter can satisfy both aims, providing dispersion (pre)compensation up to the fourth order of dispersion and make the CEP shift stable. Its use is, however, limited to a pulse intensity of 100 MW/cm2, hence its application is restricted to the front end of the (OP)CPA laser systems. A simple optical arrangement consisting of wedges with different materials and different apex angles was proposed recently for isochronic control of CEP of a pulse train. In this paper we show that assembly of wedges can be specifically designed to tune only one of the dispersion coefficients, while all the others, including CEP, remain practically unchanged. Wedge pairs changing solely the zeroth (CEP) and second order (group delay) dispersion (GDD) are experimentally presented along with a triplet of wedges tuning the third order dispersion (TOD) only. The experiment was carried out with the use of spectrally resolved interferometry (SRI). A Michelson-interferometer was illuminated by 100 nm bandwidth laser pulses of a Ti:Sapphire oscillator. The sample arm of the interferometer contained the wedge assembly, set to near Brewster-angle incidence at each surfaces, designed for tuning the required order of dispersion. At the output of the interferometer the spectral interference between the pulses from the sample and reference arms was resolved with a spectrograph. The dispersion was tuned by perpendicular shift of the entire wedge assembly to the laser beam. In the measurements spectral interferograms were recorded and evaluated at each spatial position of the assembly. Three different wedge combinations, two doublets and a triplet were designed and examined carefully. The first doublet consisted on an N-PK51 and a Lithosil-Q1E193 wedge and was designed to CEP tuning, the second one from N-SSK2 and N-LaK7 aimed to change the GDD only. The measured tuning slopes were 1.66 rad/nm and 3.6 fs2/mm, respectively. The triplet compiled of N-LaK7, N-LaSF46 and NSF57 wedges was made for TOD tuning: 130 fs3/mm was measured. All wedge assemblies only changed the selected spectral phase derivative while keeping the others practically zero. The residual angular dispersion was also measured, and found to be well below the detection limit of 0.2 μrad/nm. We have proved that a combination of optical wedges is capable to control the required order of dispersion, including CEP, independently to all the other orders. Since the loss is negligible and the (bulk) damage threshold is high, we believe that such specially designed wedge combinations can significantly contribute to the fine tuning of dispersion and CEP just prior to the compressor of high power laser systems like Petawatt Field Syntheser (PFS), Extreme Light Infrastructure (ELI), but also of smaller scale laboratory few cycle systems.