Pulse compression in the visible over 200-THz bandwidth using only chirped mirrors

Summary form only given. Recently several ultrafast optical techniques have shown the capability to generate light pulses with bandwidth in excess of 100 THz. The compression of those pulses to near-transform-limited duration calls for the development of delay lines with negative dispersion characteristics accurately controlled over such broad bandwidths. Chirped mirrors are a powerful technique for dispersion compensation, which, besides providing for broadband phase correction, greatly simplify the system design, allowing for compactness, reproducibility and ease of alignment, which are of paramount importance in practical application. For the first time to our knowledge, we demonstrate a prismless dispersion compensation scheme covering a bandwidth of 200 THz in the visible. We use double-chirped mirrors (DCMs) to compress the pulses from an ultrabroadband visible optical parametric amplifier (OPA) to an almost transform-limited duration of 5.1 fs.