Novel all-reflective stretcher for chirped-pulse amplification of ultrashort pulses

We describe the design and operation of an all-reflective on-axis pulse stretcher (with only four simple elements) that has achieved stretching ratios of over 40000. The design is insensitive to alignment errors and is simple to align. Optical aberrations in the system have an effect on the fourth-order phase term, but this can be used to compensate for material dispersion, resulting in a quintic-phase-limited chirped-pulse-amplification system.