Real-time dispersion measurement of a femtosecond laser amplifier with spectrally resolved interferometer

Summary form only given. Modern femtosecond oscillators can generate optical pulses shorter than, 10 fs. These pulses can be amplified to a desired energy level using the technique of chirped-pulse amplification (CPA). However, amplified pulses have noticeably longer duration. One of the key factors contributing to this pulse lengthening is optical dispersion in the CPA system. Typically, such a system consists of a pulse stretcher, amplifier and compressor. To our knowledge, we report the first experiment where a combination of an interferometer with an imaging spectrograph is used to monitor optical dispersion in a chirped pulse amplification system. Earlier a similar approach was used to characterize dispersion of dielectric mirror coatings.