Generation of spectrally shaped UV-vis supercontinuum femtosecond pulses by means of diffractive lenses

When a high-power infrared femtosecond pulse is focused into a transparent solid, different non-linear effects such as self-phase modulation, self-steepening, plasma generation or filamentation take place. These effects usually give rise to an extreme spectral broadening of the pulse that is termed supercontinuum (SC) generation. This contribution demonstrates the possibility to tailor the spectral features of SC pulses by using diffractive lenses (DLs), which is of great interest for applications in spectroscopy demanding spectrally shaped pulses.