Simultaneous second- and third- order spectral phase control of Ti:sapphire laser pulses using achromatic doublet prisms

The standard technique commonly utilized to introduce large amounts of negative group delay dispersion (GDD) into the beam path of ultrashort laser pulses with low insertion losses is the use of a pair of prisms in a double pass configuration. However, one disadvantage of this approach is the unavoidable introduction of additional high-order spectral phase errors, most notably third-order dispersion (TOD) due to the characteristics of the refractive index of available optical materials. In this paper we provide an overview of the dispersive properties of more than 100 common types of optical glasses, used either as a bulk stretcher or in a prism compressor configuration. In addition, we present a novel method that enables independent control of GDD and TOD in a prism-only setup. The performance of different prism combinations is analyzed numerically, and design guidelines are given.