Optical design and studies of a tiled single grating pulse compressor for enhanced parametric space and compensation of tiling errors

A new optical design of tiled single grating pulse compressor has been proposed, set-up and studied. The parametric space, i.e. the laser beam diameters that can be accommodated in the pulse compressor for the given range of compression lengths, has been calculated and shown to have up to two fold enhancement in comparison to our earlier proposed optical designs. The new optical design of the tiled single grating pulse compressor has an additional advantage of self compensation of various tiling errors like longitudinal and lateral piston, tip and groove density mismatch, compared to the earlier designs. Experiments have been carried out for temporal compression of 650 ps positively chirped laser pulses, at central wavelength 1054 nm, down to ~235 fs in the tiled grating pulse compressor set up with the proposed design. Further, far field studies have been performed to show the desired compensation of the tiling errors takes place in the new compressor.