Programmable phase and amplitude femtosecond pulse shaping

We report what is to our knowledge the first demonstration of programmable femtosecond pulse shaping that manipulates both temporal amplitude and phase. With two commercially available liquid-crystal spatial light modulators, our setup generates arbitrary temporal waveforms within a 2.9-ps window with features of less than 100 fs. We demonstrate this by producing square pulses as well as pulse sequences with a variety of specified amplitude and phase temporal profiles. We have also developed and demonstrated numerical algorithms that are used to generate the waveforms, so that the user need only specify the desired waveform and not the detailed mask patterns.