LASER TEMPORAL PULSE SHAPING EXPERIMENT FOR SPARC PHOTOINJECTOR

Laser for driving high brightness photoinjector have to produce UV square pulse which is predicted to be the optimum profile for emittance compensation in advanced photoinjectors. The longitudinal laser pulse distribution, according to numerical simulations for the SPARC photoinjector, must be square with rise and fall time shorter than 1 ps and flat top variable up to 10 ps FWHM. In this paper we report the results of pulse shaping obtained using an acousto-optic (AO) programmable dispersive filter (DAZZLER). The DAZZLER was used to perform spectral amplitude and phase modulation of the incoming 100 fs Ti:Sapphire pulses. Because of the finite length of the crystal the maximum duration of the shaped pulse is 6 ps. To overcome this limitation we used a configuration in which the laser pulses pass twice through the AO filter. A dispersive glass section was also used to lengthen the pulse with a single pass in the DAZZLER. In this paper we report the experimental setup, hardware description and time and frequency domain measurements