Spatial-temporal distribution of femtosecond pulses at the focal region of a mirror with aberrations

S. Anaya-Vera; M. Rosete-Aguilar; O. G. Rodríguez-Herrera; J. Garduño-Mejía; N. C. Bruce

doi:10.1117/12.2287082

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27 November 2017 Spatial-temporal distribution of femtosecond pulses at the focal region of a mirror with aberrations

S. Anaya-Vera, M. Rosete-Aguilar, O. G. Rodríguez-Herrera, J. Garduño-Mejía, N. C. Bruce

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Proceedings Volume 10590, International Optical Design Conference 2017; 105900F (2017) https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2287082
Event: International Optical Design Conference - IODC 2017, 2017, Denver, United States

Abstract

The spatial-temporal distribution of femtosecond pulses around the focal region of lenses has been extensively studied in recent years [1-6] due to the rapid progress in the technology of femtosecond lasers and their applications in many experiments in physics [7,8]. In this paper we present the time and spatial distribution of a few optical-cycle optical pulses around the focal region of a perfectly conducting spherical mirror which is a dispersionless system, by calculating the aberrations introduced when an off-axis collimated beam is incident on the mirror. The Seidel aberration theory has been used to calculate the wavefront aberration and the corresponding phase change for each frequency at the pupil of the mirror. The propagation of the beam from the exit pupil to the focal region is calculated by using the scalar diffraction theory [9]. The effect of aberrations in the focusing pulses has been analyzed in the literature by approximating the wavenumber of the pulse-frequencies by the wavenumber of the carrier frequency [4, 5]. In this paper we show that the monochromatic aberrations change the temporal duration of few-optical-cycle pulses when this approximation is removed. When this approximation is used, monochromatic aberrations do not introduce any temporal change in the focusing pulse even for pulses as short as 2.7fs@810nm which corresponds to a oneoptical-cycle pulse. Examples are presented for homogeneous and Gaussian illumination on the entrance pupil.

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S. Anaya-Vera, M. Rosete-Aguilar, O. G. Rodríguez-Herrera, J. Garduño-Mejía, and N. C. Bruce "Spatial-temporal distribution of femtosecond pulses at the focal region of a mirror with aberrations", Proc. SPIE 10590, International Optical Design Conference 2017, 105900F (27 November 2017); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2287082

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