Versatile 7-fs optical parametric pulse generation and compression by use of adaptive optics.

We have compressed the output from a beta-barium borate noncollinear optical parametric amplifier to ~7-fs pulse durations, using a micromachined deformable mirror with an efficient search algorithm. This compression method allows phase compensation of both material and gain dispersion, which produces an optimized wavelength-tunable pulse shape for ultrahigh-resolution time-domain spectroscopy.