Generation of spectrally shaped UV-vis supercontinuum femtosecond pulses by means of diffractive lenses

When a high-power infrared femtosecond pulse is focused into a transparent solid, different non-linear effects such as self-phase modulation, self-steepening, plasma generation or filamentation take place. These effects usually give rise to an extreme spectral broadening of the pulse that is termed supercontinuum (SC) generation [1]. In this contribution we demonstrate the possibility to tailor the spectral features of SC pulses by using diffractive lenses (DLs) [2], which is of great interest for applications in spectroscopy demanding spectrally shaped pulses.