Pulse shaping

Chirp

Ultrashort pulse

Materials science

Optoelectronics

Detector

Telecommunications

Femtosecond pulse shaping

Physics

Pulse compression

Optics

Femtosecond

Amplifier

Pulse (music)

Computer science

Multiphoton intrapulse interference phase scan

Bandwidth (computing)

Laser

Bandwidth-limited pulse

Radar

Science

Advances in ultrafast lasers, chirped pulse amplifiers, and frequency comb technology require fundamentally new pulse-modulation strategies capable of supporting unprecedentedly large bandwidth and high peak power while maintaining high spectral resolution. We demonstrate how dielectric metasurfaces can be leveraged to shape the temporal profile of a near-infrared femtosecond pulse. Finely tailored pulse-shaping operations, including splitting, compression, chirping, and higher-order distortion, are achieved using a Fourier-transform setup embedding metasurfaces able to manipulate, simultaneously and independently, the amplitude and phase of the constituent frequency components of the pulse. Exploiting metasurfaces to manipulate the temporal characteristics of light expands their impact and opens new vistas in the field of ultrafast science and technology.

Ultrafast optical pulse shaping using dielectric metasurfaces