Where to Buy Pulse Compressors

Thorlabs manufactures a suite of options for dispersion management, including pre-compensation modules, dispersion compensating fiber, chirped mirrors, and low GDD optics. For ultrafast applications where dispersion must be well known and managed, Thorlabs’ portfolio includes a robust benchtop white light interferometer for characterizing reflective and transmissive dispersive properties of optics and coatings. The Chromatis™ dispersion measurement system covers 500 – 1650 nm, providing a means for measuring optics used for common femtosecond systems, including Ti:sapphire systems as well as 1 µm and 1550 nm oscillators. The Chromatis compliments our ultrafast family of lasers, amplifiers, and specialized optics including chirped mirrors, low GDD mirrors/beamsplitters, and dispersion compensating fiber.

The APE femtoControl is a compact motorized dispersion compensation unit for compressing femtosecond laser pulses in the spectral range of Ti:sapphire lasers.

femtoControl compensates for material dispersion by applying the inverse amount of dispersion to the pulse. This is generated by a pair of prisms on motorized translation stages allowing continuous adjustment of the pulse length.

For example, femtoControl can help to achieve more crisp and clearer microscope images especially for multi-photon microscopy.

Low dispersion management reflectors for passive mode-locking of ultrafast lasers.

The Savanna-HP pulse compressor is based on a stretched flexible hollow-core fiber (SF-HCF). It has been developed in a collaboration with the Institute for Nanophotonics in Göttingen. It spectrally broadens high-energy femtosecond input pulses by nonlinear interaction with a noble gas of adjustable gas pressure inside a hollow fiber and subsequently compresses the pulse using chirped mirror technology from UltraFast Innovations (UFI).

The state of the art SF-HCF technique allows nearly ideal waveguiding, reducing the losses to a minimum and allowing the application of self-phase modulation over an interaction length of up to 8 m. It can handle extremely intense input pulses with a few tens of mJ pulses and an average power of up to 20 W – with active cooling, even up to several hundred watts. With this, we provide an unmatched compression unit for today's state of the art lasers.

The KMLabs RAEA Ti:sapphire amplifier system consists of a mode-locked oscillator, stretcher module, amplifier module, and compressor module for providing mJ-class energies in a pulsewidth < 35 fs.

The Fastlas allows for the compression of ultrashort laser pulses down to the few-cycle regime. It is based on our hollow core fiber technology. It works input pulses with durations from 30 fs to 1 ps, energies from nanojoules to millijoules, and in wide spectral regions from the UV to the IR. It can be used as a compact stand-alone table top solution or fully integrated into other devices.

d-scan is an inline, compact and high-performance device for the simultaneous measurement and compression of even the most demanding ultrafast pulses. d-scan can be used either as a standalone system or integrated with existing optical pulse compressors. It handles broadband oscillators, amplifiers, OPAs and hollow-fiber compressors.

Coupling your beam into the d-scan is easily achieved in less than one minute and a full measurement takes less than 10 seconds. The resulting d-scan traces are very intuitive and a proprietary algorithm provides fast and accurate retrieval of the full electric field of the pulses.