Acousto-optic programmable ultrashort optical pulse shape modulator

An acousto-optic programmable ultrashort optical pulse shape modulator (AO-PPSM) is presented, which can compensate for large amounts of dispersion over large spectral bandwidths while at the same time provide amplitude shaping with high contrast. The analytical expression relating the group delay and amplitude at the output of the AO-PPSM to the input acoustic signal is obtained with coupled-wave theory in the case of collinear acousto-optic interactions. With these relations, the acoustic signal that will induce an arbitrary group-delay variation with frequency can be easily obtained.