Shaping of femtosecond pulses using phase-only filters designed by simulated annealing

We describe generation of shaped femtosecond waveforms by using frequency-domain phase-only filters designed by numerical optimization techniques. The task of filter design for pulse shaping in the time domain is directly analogous to the design of phase-only filters for beam shaping and array generation in the spatial domain. We experimentally tested phase filters that were designed to produce ultrafast square and triangle pulses and femtosecond pulse sequences. Our results demonstrate the ability to generate high-quality terahertz-repetition-rate sequences of femtosecond pulses by means of low-loss phase-only filtering. On the other hand, experiments that tested generation of individual shaped pulses, such as square pulses, were less successful than previous experiments that used simultaneous phase and amplitude filtering. Our results indicate the importance of building increased robustness against variations in the input pulse shape into the phaseonly filter design.