Programmable optical pulse compression to sub-5-fs using a spatial light modulator

Summary form only given. Ultrashort pulse generation has advanced considerably in recently years and optical pulses in the 4-5-fs regime have been generated by external pulse compression and directly from Ti:sapphire oscillators. Among them, the combinations of prism-pair, grating-pair and chirped mirrors are commonly used for dispersion compensation. Pulse shaping by using a spatial light modulator (SLM) manifests the capability to arbitrary phase control and therefore independently large cubic and higher-order dispersion compensation. However, the shortest optical pulse generation using this technique was only 11 fs at 800 nm up to now. We demonstrate sub-5-fs optical pulse compression by using programmable controlled SLM in a pulse-shaping configuration when cubic and quartic phases are optimized.