Dispersion compensation over 200 THz in the visible using only chirped mirrors in an optical parametric amplifier

Summary form only given. Recently several ultrafast optical techniques have shown the capability to generate light pulses with bandwidth exceeding 100 THz. The compression of these pulses to transform-limited duration calls for the development of delay lines with negative dispersion accurately controlled over such broad bandwidths. Chirped mirrors are a powerful dispersion compensation technique which, besides providing for broadband phase correction, greatly simplifies the system design, allowing for compactness, reproducibility and ease of alignment. We demonstrate for the first time a prismless dispersion compensation scheme covering a bandwidth of 200 THz in the visible. We use double-chirped mirrors (DCMs) to compress the pulses from an ultrabroadband visible optical parametric amplifier (OPA) to a near-transform-limited duration of 5.1 fs.