Generation of high-quality sub-10 femtosecond laser pulses with intracavity spatial and spectral control

Summary form only given. Generation of sub-10 fs optical pulses requires a spectral bandwidth of more than 100 nm. Literature data for such pulses very often show pronounced satellite structures in both the frequency and time domain, however. In this situation, the usual pulse characterization by the FWHM of the intensity profile often yields a poor description of the real waveforms. Here we propose new pulse parameters for the characterization of pulses with significant temporal and spectral substructure. We apply this method to improve the laser pulse quality using the parameters for resonator design guidelines which allow generation of nearly single transverse mode smooth sub-10 fs optical pulses from a Ti:sapphire laser.