Quick Shot

Senior Laboratory Engineer, Sara Bucht, is shown here with the grism stretcher that she designed and built, which uses gratings mounted next to prisms to form “grisms.” The grism stretcher is used to manipulate the temporal profile of OPAL (optical parametric amplifier line) in order to compress the typically discarded idler pulse. To stretch the pulse to almost a nanosecond pulse duration, large custom optics are used, which resulted in a daunting design process requiring navigation through a parameter space involving 11 total variables. The inset shows the prism with the grating.