Ultrashort laser pulses with chromatic astigmatism

Abstract

Ultrashort laser pulses are described having chromatic astigmatism, where the astigmatic phase varies linearly with the offset from the central frequency. Such a spatio-temporal coupling not only induces interesting space-frequency and space-time effects, but it removes cylindrical symmetry. We analyze the quantitative effects on the spatio-temporal pulse structure on the collimated beam and as it propagates through a focus, with both the fundamental Gaussian beam and Laguerre-Gaussian beams. Chromatic astigmatism is a new type of spatio-temporal coupling towards arbitrary higher complexity beams that still have a simple description, and may be applied to imaging, metrology, or ultrafast light-matter interaction.

12 pages, 8 figures, submitted to Optics Express

References in corpus (2)

• Nonlinear Thomson scattering with ponderomotive control
• Tailoring the spatio-temporal distribution of diffractive focused ultrashort pulses through pulse shaping

Cited by in corpus (2)

• Coupling to multi-mode waveguides with space-time shaped free-space pulses
• On the localization of the high-intensity region of simultaneous space-time foci