Abstract
The temporal shape of picosecond pulses may be manipulated by spatially masking the amplitude and/or phase of the Fourier components of the pulse field which are dispersed within a grating pulse compressor. Arbitrary pulse shapes may be produced, subject only so the usual limitation imposed by finite bandwidth and by the spatial resolution imposed by diffraction. We demonstrate this technique in a series of experiments where the phase as well as the amplitude1 of the field is filtered with a variety of masks. The measured pulse shapes are well accounted for by a simple theory which constructs the shaped puise intensity from the square of the inverse Fourier transform of the filtered input field Fourier components. Note that the amplitude and phase of our masks may be independently and arbitrarily controlled. This provides a more general method of pulse shaping than is available from systems of atomic or molecular transitions.
© 1985 Optical Society of America
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