Compact optical grating compressor

TL;DR

This paper introduces a compact optical grating compressor design that significantly increases group delay dispersion by inserting lenses, enabling smaller size without sacrificing dispersion performance.

Contribution

It presents a simple modification to the traditional Treacy compressor, adding lenses to enhance dispersion or reduce size while maintaining performance.

Findings

Significant increase in group delay dispersion achieved

Design maintains small size of the compressor

Theoretical and numerical models confirm performance improvements

Abstract

A novel design of a grating-based optical pulse compressor is proposed. The proposed compressor provides a large group delay dispersion while keeping the compressor linear size small. The design of the proposed compressor is based on a traditional Treacy compressor with a straightforward modification of inserting two lenses between the compressor's gratings. This simple alternation aims to substantially increase group delay dispersion of the compressor or alternatively to decrease the compressor size while maintaining its group delay dispersion. A theoretical description of the enhanced compressor has been developed in the paraxial approximation. A detailed numerical model has been built to calculate the compressor parameters more accurately. These theoretical studies have revealed that the enhanced optical compressor provides a significant increase in the group delay dispersion compared to a standard Treacy compressor.