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.

Liquid crystal light beam control devices and their manufacture are described. Beneficial aspects of beam broadening devices employed for controlled illumination and architectural purposes are presented including improving beam divergence control, improving beam broadening dynamic range control, beam divergence preconditioning, improving projected beam intensity uniformity.

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 diffractive optical element, such as a plasma grating, can be made by directing two laser beams so that they overlap in a nonlinear material to form an interference pattern in the nonlinear material. The interference pattern can modify the index of refraction in the nonlinear material to produce the diffractive optical element. A chirped pulse amplification system can stretch, amplify, and then compress a laser pulse, and the plasma grating can be used to compress the laser pulse since the plasma optic can withstand the high light intensity of the compressed pulse.

A method and a system for arbitrary optical waveform generation from an optical input, the system comprising an optical shaper comprising unbalanced interferometers with at least one delay, the delay being selected of at least 0.1 ps, an optical sampling readout selected for measuring optical waveforms of at least 0.1 ps; and an electronic processing unit; wherein the optical input is a picosecond pulse; with a minimal pulse duration before the optical shaper equal to a minimal delay of the optical shaper; the optical shaper splitting and interfering optical pulses; the optical sampling readout collecting data at an output of the optical shaper; and the electronic processing unit comparing the collected data with a preset target and updating the optical shaper from results of the comparison until a maximal match between the output of the optical shaper and the preset target output, wherein the maximal match is determined iteratively using one of: machine-learning, optimization algorithms and iterative search algorithms.

A shaping encoder capable of improving the performance of PCS in nonlinear optical channels by performing the shaping in two or more stages. In an example embodiment, a first stage employs a shaping code of a relatively short block length, which is typically beneficial for nonlinear optical channels but may cause a significant penalty in the energy efficiency. A second stage then employs a shaping code of a much larger block length, which significantly reduces or erases the penalty associated with the short block length of the first stage while providing an additional benefit of good performance in substantially linear optical channels. In at least some embodiments, the shaping encoder may have relatively low circuit-implementation complexity and/or relatively low cost and provide relatively high energy efficiency and relatively high shaping gain for a variety of optical channels, including but not limited to the legacy dispersion-managed fiber-optic links.

A device for processing an input light beam comprising at least one optical pulse having an original duration, forms the input light beam into a predetermined shape. The device comprises an optical input; a stretching device, with a view to temporally elongating the duration of the optical pulse and thus transmitting a temporally stretched radiation; a compressing device, with a view to at least partially restoring the original duration of the optical pulse; and an optical output. The processing device also comprises a shaping device comprising at least one multi-plane converter placed upstream of the compressing device, which is configured to process the temporally stretched radiation with a view to forming the output beam into the predetermined shape.

An optical amplifier arrangement has optical parametric amplifiers and white light generations and harmonic generation, in particular frequency doubling, for generating a wide visible to infrared, in any case near-infrared, spectrum of coherent ultra-short light pulses, in particular with a pump laser, and also to a . A method During operation the fundamental is in a wavelength range above 950 nm, and the second signal light and the second idler light of the second optical parametric amplifier together cover a tunability range of wavelengths between 500 nm and 5 μm, in particular between 550 nm and 3 μm, wherein between wavelengths in the tunability range throughout continuous tuning can be carried out, namely through the degeneration range of the second optical parametric amplifier (OPA2) at the fundamental of the pump laser.

The present invention concerns an iterative method for spatially or temporally shaping a laser beam. The spatial shaping of the beam uses a light valve and the temporal shaping of a pulse uses a Mach-Zehnder modulator. At each spatial shaping iteration, the profile of the observed beam is projected onto an adapted basis set in order to obtain observed profile components in this basis set. The ratios are calculated between the components of a setpoint profile in this basis set and the components of the observed profile, and the ratio of the profiles at the output of the light valve is deduced. The control for each element of the valve is then determined as the product of the control for this same element, obtained at the previous iteration, and the ratio of the profiles for the position of this element, obtained at the current iteration.

Disclosed are ideas to produce an add-on device which turns widely used high repetition rate lasers used for 2-photon microscopy into a light source which can be used for 3-photon microscopy. The add-on encompasses a device to reduce the pulse repetition rate of the high repetition rate (>50 MHz) laser source (laser or OPO) to less than 10 MHz which allows for higher pulse energies while maintaining reasonable average powers. If the high repetition sources operate below 1250 nm the add-on shifts or broadens the seed light to cover 1.3 μm to 1.8 μm before amplification. If the high repetition rate source operates at or around 1.3 μm the add-on only needs to amplify the pulse after downshifting the repetition rate. In another implementation the add-on shifts or broadens the 1.3 μm light to cover the spectral range out to 1.8 μm before amplification.