A Compact Zigzag Compressor for Spectrally-Divided CPA

Traditionally, the practical stretching and compression ratio in fs CPA is limited by the width of the diffraction gratings and associated with the prohibitive cost, substrate translation range in ion/electron beam machines, etc. Doubling dispersive power by double-passing the compressor is not advisable as it squares the diffraction losses. Techniques to mitigate the grating aperture limit include phase-locked tiling of multiple gratings [1] or spatial pre-chirping [2] to accommodate more colors on the largest compressor grating. In addition, there exist numerous schemes to enhance dispersive power with additional angular dispersion elements, e.g. VIPA [3], FACED [4], Spectral Shuttle, [5] which cannot be applied for dispersion management of fs pulses because of discrete spectral modes in their throughput and/or inability to match the stretcher and compressor dispersion. Here we present a possible dispersion management solution, summarized in Fig. 1, which answers the challenge of further energy scaling without changing the working aperture of the stretcher and compressor gratings, ensures mechanical robustness and compactness and does not introduce additional diffraction losses in the compressor grating pair.