Off-plane diffraction in pulse stretcher and compressor

In this experiment, the measured horizontal angular chirp of our stretcher agreed with the calculations. The vertical chirp was very small and under resolution of our measurement (20 farad), which was also in agreement with the calculations. Laser pulses of a Ti:sapphire laser with a pulsewidth of 14.4 fs were stretched to 360 ps and recompressed back to 17.5 fs without an amplification (Fig.). We found out that the difference in both pulsewidths is caused by an uncompensated temporal chirp and by the angular chirp due to the residual beam aberrations. In both pulse stretcher and compressor we observed a high power transmission (over 50 %) and negligible distortion of pulse spectrum in a range from 680 nm to 900 nm.