Novel Temporal Zone Plate Designs With Improved Energy Efficiency and Noise Performance

We propose and demonstrate novel temporal zone plate designs offering a higher energy efficiency and an improved background noise performance than previously proposed approaches using similar experimental configurations. Two kinds of novel temporal zone plates, namely, temporal amplitude zone plates and temporal phase Fresnel lenses, are introduced and studied. The proposed designs are demonstrated for optical linear pulse compression. In the reported experiments, temporal amplitude zone plates are shown to provide a 96% improvement in energy efficiency (or light-collecting efficiency) and significantly reduce noise background as compared with equivalent temporal intensity zone plates. On the other hand, a temporal phase Fresnel lens is shown to offer an ideal light-collecting efficiency of 100%, greatly exceeding the efficiency of an equivalent temporal phase zone plate. Performance in a practical setup is however limited by the achievable modulation bandwidth and a 37% efficiency improvement over previous designs is experimentally demonstrated.