Spectral pulse synthesis in large-scale ultrafast coherent combining systems

Abstract : We propose the use of coherent spectral synthesis to reach shorter pulse durations in the context of massively parallel femtosec-ond coherent combining laser systems. A preliminary experiment that performs spectral synthesis with two femtosecond fiber chirped-pulse amplifiers is presented, and shows that a significant decrease of the amplified pulse duration compared to single-band amplification is achieved. We also discuss possible implementation of spectral synthesis in a large-scale coherent combining setup.