Dispersion control over 150 THz with chirped dielectric mirrors

Ultrabroad-band chirped multilayer dielectric mirrors providing nearly constant negative group delay dispersion over the wavelength range of 640-950 nm and high reflectance between 590 and 970 nm are demonstrated. A key to this performance has been an improved design method, which also substantially reduces the computing time needed for ultimate optimization. The presented devices constitute an enabling technology for producing high-quality terawatt pulses in the sub-10-fs regime. The generation of 5-fs 0.1-TW pulses by using exclusively these mirrors as negative delay line demonstrates this potential.