An on-chip bidirectional pulse compressor for temporal compression and spectral compression. The on-chip bidirectional pulse compressor including a substrate; a nonlinear waveguide disposed on the substrate, wherein the nonlinear waveguide is dimensioned to induce a nonlinear response within a predetermined operating wavelength ranges and is made of a material free of two-photon absorption at the predetermined operating wavelength ranges; and an anomalous dispersive component disposed on the substrate. The nonlinear waveguide and the anomalous dispersive component are interconnected for bidirectional pulse propagation, wherein propagating through the nonlinear waveguide followed by the anomalous dispersive component causes temporal compression, and propagating through the anomalous dispersive component followed by the nonlinear waveguide causes spectral compression. Various embodiments also include an optical device including the on-chip bidirectional pulse compressor.

The present application relates to a method and system for characterization and compression of ultrashort pulses. It is described a flexible self-calibrating dispersion-scan technique and respective system to characterize and compress ultrashort laser pulses over a broad range of pulse parameters, where previous knowledge of the amount of dispersion introduced for each position or step of the compressor is not required. The self-calibrating d-scan operation is based on the numerical retrieval of the spectral phase of the pulses using an optimization algorithm, where the spectral phase is treated as a multi-parameter unknown variable, and where the unknown dispersion of the dispersion scanning system is described by a theoretical model of its functional dependence on the compressor position.

An example laser system includes one or more optical transmission media that are part of an optical path originating at a laser generator configured to generate an input laser beam. The example laser system includes an analyzer for receiving the input laser beam and for characterizing at least a profile and energy of the input laser beam. The example laser system includes a circulator for receiving the input laser beam from the analyzer and for minimizing or eliminating reflections. The example laser system includes a beam transformer for receiving the input laser beam from the circulator and for altering at least one property of the input laser beam thereby generating an output laser beam. The example laser system includes a writing head for altering at least one optical property of the beam transformer.

This present disclosure describes a method, a device, and a system for performing a pulse shaping method that accurately converts short laser pulses into arbitrarily programmable optical waveforms with much longer duration. The optical pulse shaping method is based on multi-frequency acoustic-optic modulation and retro-diffraction based multiple optical delay line generation. Regarding the optical pulse shaping method, precise high-speed programming control on amplitudes, phases, and delays of a picosecond ultrashort sub-pulse sequence is implemented, to obtain an arbitrary waveform optical pulse with a near-THz bandwidth and a coherence time up to nanoseconds, for applications in quantum control of atomic/molecular optical transition.

A modulation pattern calculation apparatus includes an iterative Fourier transform unit, a filtering process unit, and a modulation pattern calculation unit. The iterative Fourier transform unit performs a Fourier transform on a waveform function including an intensity spectrum function and a phase spectrum function, performs a replacement of a temporal intensity waveform function based on a desired waveform after the Fourier transform and then performs an inverse Fourier transform, and performs a replacement to constrain the phase spectrum function after the inverse Fourier transform. The filtering process unit performs a filtering process of cutting a part exceeding a cutoff intensity for each wavelength, on the intensity spectrum function in a frequency domain.

An ultrafast electro-optic laser makes a stabilized comb and includes: a comb generator that produces a frequency comb; a dielectric resonant oscillator; a phase modulator in communication with the dielectric resonant oscillator; an intensity modulator in communication with the phase modulator; an optical tailor in communication with the comb generator and that produces tailored light; a filter cavity in communication with the intensity modulator; a pulse shaper in communication with the filter cavity; a highly nonlinear fiber and compressor in communication with the pulse shaper; an interferometer in communication with the optical tailor and that produces a difference frequency from the tailored light; and an electrical stabilizer in communication with the interferometer and the comb generator and that produces the stabilization signal with a stabilized local oscillator cavity that produces a stabilized local oscillator signal that is converted into the stabilization signal and communicated to the dielectric resonant oscillator.

A Fourier transform is performed on a first waveform function in a frequency domain, and a second waveform function in a time domain including a temporal intensity waveform function and a temporal phase waveform function is generated. A replacement of the temporal intensity waveform function based on a desired waveform is performed for the second waveform function. The second waveform function is modified so as to bring a spectrogram of the second waveform function close to a target spectrogram generated in advance in accordance with a desired wavelength band. An inverse Fourier transform is performed on the modified second waveform function, and a third waveform function in the frequency domain is generated. Data is generated on the basis of an intensity spectrum function or a phase spectrum function of the third waveform function.

A beam shaping system including an all-optical liquid crystal beam shaper, the beam shaper including a photoswitchable alignment material including at least one of a PESI-F, SPMA:MMA 1:5, SPMA:MMA 1:9, ora SOMA: SOMA-p:MMA 1:1:6 material, at least some of the liquid crystals of the beam shaper including at least one of a phenylcyclohexane, cyclo-cyclohexane, or a perfluorinated material.

A light turning element and a method fabricating such a light turning element are described. The light turning element comprises a layer of liquid crystal material. The layer of liquid crystal material defining a plane. The layer of liquid crystal material is configured such that an angle () between a director (n) of the liquid crystal material and a first dimension (x) is an oscillating function of position in the first dimension x. The first dimension x is a dimension within the plane.

Disclosed is a system for generating short or ultra-short light pulses, including a light source configured to emit temporally continuous-wave light radiation, an electrical generator configured to operate at a tunable frequency in a passband included between 5 and 100 GHz and to emit an analogue modulating electrical signal including at least one electrical pulse of duration included between 10 ps and 100 ps, and an electro-optical modulator having electrodes and an electrical passband that are suitable for receiving the analog modulating electrical signal, the electro-optical modulator being configured to optically amplitude modulate the continuous-wave light radiation depending of the analog modulating electrical signal and to generate modulated light radiation including at least one light pulse of duration included between 10 ps and 100 ps.