Single-diffraction-grating and grism pulse compressors

We introduce and demonstrate a simple, compact, and automatically aligned ultrashort-pulse compressor that uses only a single diffraction element-a grating or a grism (a grating on a prism). This design automatically has unity beam magnification and automatically contributes zero spatiotemporal distortions to the pulse, thus avoiding spatial chirp, angular dispersion, pulse-front tilt, and all other first-order spatiotemporal distortions. It is comprised of only three elements: a diffraction element, a corner cube, and a roof mirror. Half the size of comparable two-grating compressors, it can provide large amounts of negative group-delay dispersion with small translations of the corner cube. The device can operate on pulses with both large and small bandwidths by varying the corner-cube position. Using a grism as the diffraction element, material dispersion up to the third order can be compensated, and we demonstrated compensation for 10 m of optical fiber for 800 nm pulses. (C) 2010 Optical Society of America