Aberration compensation of a curved diffraction grating stretcher for femtosecond chirped-pulse amplification

We recently introduced a new compact pulse stretcher [Opt. Lett. 22, 811 (1997)] that uses standard curved gratings and has several advantages over other systems. It provides positive group-delay dispersion and adequately matches the standard grating pair compressor, which makes it useful in chirped-pulse amplification We analyze the conditions that the different parameters of the stretcher must satisfy to be afocal as well as the problem of chromatic aberrations. (C) 1997 Optical Society of America.