Compact Metasurface-Based Optical Pulse-Shaping Device

Dispersion is present in every optical setup and is often an undesired effect, especially in nonlinear-optical experiments where ultrashort laser pulses are needed. Typically, bulky pulse compressors consisting of gratings or prisms are used to address this issue by precompensating the dispersion of the optical components. However, these devices are only able to compensate for a part of the dispersion (second-order dispersion). Here, we present a compact pulse-shaping device that uses plasmonic metasurfaces to apply an arbitrarily designed spectral phase delay allowing for a full dispersion control. Furthermore, with specific phase encodings, this device can be used to temporally reshape the incident laser pulses into more complex pulse forms such as a double pulse. We verify the performance of our device by using an SHG-FROG measurement setup together with a retrieval algorithm to extract the dispersion that our device applies to an incident laser pulse.