High spatiotemporal resolution in multifocal processing with femtosecond laser pulses

We report spatial and temporal dispersion compensation for fan-out of femtosecond pulses with a low-frequency diffraction grating by means of a hybrid diffractive-refractive lens triplet. In this way, we achieve a multifocal light structure with nearly diffraction-limited light spots even for 20 fs pulse duration. The spatial chromatic compensation, which drastically reduces the lateral walk-off of the various spectral components, also allows us to improve the available bandwidth at the dispersion-compensated diffraction orders. In fact, the temporal width of the output pulse is essentially limited by the group-delay dispersion term, which is shown to be small. The high spatiotemporal resolution provided by our proposal permits parallel multifocal processing of materials with femtosecond pulses. (c) 2006 Optical Society of America.