Acousto-optic modulator pulse-shaper compression of octave-spanning pulses from a stretched hollow-core fiber

We demonstrate spectral broadening and compression of amplified pulses from a titanium sapphire laser system using an argon-filled stretched, hollow-core fiber and an acoustooptic modulator based pulse-shaper. We characterize the pulses using pulse-shaper assisted collinear frequency resolved optical gating, pulse-shaper assisted D-scans, and D-scans using a variable path length water cell. The different compression and characterization approaches consistently compress the pulses down to < 6 fs, less than ∼1 fs from the transform limit. We discuss prospects for pulse shape spectroscopy with these broadband pulses, given our control over the spectral amplitude and phase.