Stretching or Compression of Ultrashort Pulses with Highly Efficient Transmission Gratings

Precise control over the ultrashort pulses is of importance for various applications. Prisms and gratings are typical optical components that are used for manipulating the temporal behavior of pulses. In this example, we use two transmission gratings, according to the work of T. Clausnitzer et al., to build up a stretching / compressing system for ultrashort pulses. Particularly, we analyze the polarization-dependent effects that is caused by the gratings, and we optimized the gratings to obtain a polarization-independent system with high efficiency.