Optical pulse compression using high-frequency electrooptic phase modulation

An electrooptic method of generating and compressing optical pulses in the picosecond range is described. The method utilizes electrooptic phase modulation together with group delay/velocity dispersion and is applicable to most CW lasers. From the theoretical analysis, it is shown that normal as well as anomalous dispersion is applicable for pulse compression and that nearly transform-limited pulses can be obtained by the optimum choice of group-delay dispersion. In experiments, pulse compression was utilized for a CW Ar laser using a LiTaO/sub 3/ electrooptic phase modulator with a diffraction grating. Almost transform-limited pulses of 2.1 ps were obtained at 9.35-GHz repetition. The possibility of generating subpicosecond pulses down to several tens of femtosecond pulses is also discussed.<>