PhD, Dissertation: Spatial Beam Shaping of High Power Ultra Short Laser Pulses, Applied Science, College of William and Mary (2007)

We are developing a Ti:sapphire amplifier system capable of producing pulses of 3 mJ, with less than 100 femtosecond pulse duration, at 30 Hz repetition rate. This chirped pulse amplification system consists of a pulse stetcher, two  multi-pass stages with a total gain of 10^7-10^8, and a compressor. It is ideal for x-ray sources and harmonic generation.

Spatial Beam Shaping of Ultra Short Laser Pulses: Theory and Experiment

We studied the spatial average intensity profile of an ultrashort laser pulse passing through a laser beam shaping system, which uses diffractive optical elements to reshape the Gaussian beam profile into a flat-top distribution. The Nonlinear Schrodinger Equation is solved numerically to simulate the nonlinear optical effects in this system. Our data and calculation show that this system works well for ultrashort pulses (> 100 fs). We also studied the effects of lateral misalignment, beam size deviation and defocusing on the beam intensity profile.