Distortion-Free Single-Prism/Grating Ultrashort Laser Pulse Compressor

We introduce an ultrashort laser pulse compressor that uses a single-prism and a single-grating. It is compact and automatically aligned and compensates for significant second- and third-order material dispersion. This design inherently 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 common to pulse compressors. It is comprised of only four elements: a prism, a diffraction grating, a corner cube, and a roof mirror. It can provide large amounts of negative group-delay dispersion with small translations of the corner cube. Unlike conventional compressors, the device can operate on pulses with both large and small bandwidths by varying the corner cube position. Using this compressor, we demonstrate compensation of 12 m of optical fiber for 800-nm pulses with 30 nm of bandwidth.