Automated spatiotemporal diffraction of ultrashort laser pulses

We exploit the close similarities between time-frequency and position-wave-vector correspondences to control the spatiotemporal diffraction pattern of ultrashort laser pulses. This approach permits novel, automated generation of sophisticated two-dimensional femtosecond waveforms. A two-dimensional space-time version of a Gerchberg-Saxton algorithm is used to iteratively determine the phase pattern in position-frequency space that produces a user-defined intensity profile in wave-vector-time space.