Advanced Development for Defense Science and Technology

The ability to precisely control dispersion with thin-film dielectric filters is an enabling technology in short pulse lasers, allowing for durations below five femtoseconds. Such laser systems have revolutionized areas central to many DOD missions and capabilities, such as directed laser energy systems, precision optical metrology to enhance inertial navigation systems, and optical arbitrary waveform generation for high resolution optical sensing, to name a few. Going forward, as the attosecond regime is developed, dispersion compensating mirror systems are needed to enable enhancement cavities for high harmonic generation which provides researchers with access to coherent XUV and soft X-ray radiation from cost effective oscillators rather than complex amplifier systems. Similar dispersion-controlled cavities can be used for repetition-rate multiplication, an important capability for sources to be used in e.g. waveform generation. These new applications require precision, bandwidth and damage tolerance at the limits of what is possible with current mirror technology. We propose to extend these limits through improved design optimization and material selection. We will leverage newly available commercial grid computing systems to develop global search algorithms for finding optimal mirror configurations and to optimize manufacturing tolerances, addressing a major practical limitation to the production of highly precise dispersion compensating mirrors.