Octave spanning wedge dispersive mirrors with low dispersion oscillations.

A novel concept for octave spanning dispersive mirrors with low spectral dispersion oscillations is presented. The key element of the so-called wedge dispersive mirror is a slightly wedged layer which is coated on a specially optimized dispersive multilayer stack by a common sputter coating process. The group delay dispersion (GDD) of a pulse reflected on a wedge dispersive mirror is nearly free of oscillations. Fabricated mirrors with negative GDD demonstrate the compression of a pulse down to 3.8 fs as good as double angled mirrors optimized for the same bandwidth.