Shortly speaking - dispersion of  prism, grating and   material  is main parameter responsible for compression or  stretching of pulse duration. You can  look through the attached material to have  more broad description of the  problem.

I appreciate your response, but I was wondering if you could do me a favor to give me more details regarding this question: having a given pair of diffraction grating and prism,what are those important factors needing to be considered in an appropriate design?I think of these ones: Nonlinear GVD, Astigmatism, non-linear astigmatism, angular dispersion, pulse repetition rate to avoid overlapping of pulses due the dispersion, damage threshold, dimension.

what do you opt for?

best regards.

The specific choices of prisms/gratings will be determined by the target performance of the output pulses. What is the target pulse energy? The nonlinear dispersion/B-integral of prisms may be inappropriate for higher pulse energies, and the size of the gratings may need to be scaled to keep below the damage threshold. What is the target repetition rate? The average power of the laser may dictate the substrate to be used for the grating. What is the target bandwidth/pulse duration? Dielectric gratings may offer higher damage threshold or throughput, but metal gratings may be necessary for compression of the large bandwidths required for very short pulses. Other concerns include the groove density of the grating or the material/apex angle of the prisms, but remember also that stretcher/compressor designs involve much more than just the angularly-dispersive optics (imaging optics for the stretcher, grating/prism spacing, etc.). There are also other ways to stretch and compress pulses besides prisms/gratings, such as fibers, grisms, chirped mirrors, bulk material, AOPDF, etc., some of which may be better for your application.

Thanks a lot!

If we assume that we use Ti:sapphire Laser with pulse energy 10 NJ , repetition rate 100 MHz , pulse duration 15 fs and beam waist 2-3mm ; then by using stretcher we change pulse duration to 100 ps so that pulse energy and beam waist approximately remain constant ; what is the best stretcher according to this Circumstances?

Also, do you know other ways to stretch and compress pulses besides prisms/gratings, fibers, grisms, chirped mirrors, bulk material and AOPDF?

Hello --

In my experience with chirped pulse amplification systems, the most common types of grating stretchers are the Martinez-type and the Offner-type. Below I have included two highly-cited publications providing a suitable starting point for learning more about each stretcher type in case you are not already familiar with them.

In terms of other ways to stretch and compress pulses, off the top of my head I don't have much to add to what I already mentioned. I suppose there are nonlinear effects that have the ability to stretch/compress pulses to some extent under the right circumstances (self-phase modulation, cascaded nonlinearities, etc.), though these can be very tricky to manage. In other cases (such as narrow bandwidth applications), "stretching" and "compressing" a single pulse in the traditional chirped-pulse sense can be dropped in favor of "splitting" and "recombining" pulses as in divided-pulse amplification, in which a single pulse is split into many lower-energy copies that can be recombined after amplification.

Good luck, and hope that helps, ~Eric

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Hello, dear Eric and Gilles.

Your answers were tremendously helpful, especially Eric.I deeply appreciate you.

Good luck!