Quartic phase compensation with a standard grating compressor.

We demonstrate that, by changing the altitude and the azimuth incident angles on the gratings of the conventional grating-pair compressor used in chirped-pulse amplification, an extra degree of freedom is added. This results in a continuous adjustment of second-, third-, and fourth-order dispersions, which allows one to compensate for those dispersions that originated in the expansor or in the amplifier medium as a result of material dispersion or self-phase modulation, even with small out-of-plane tilts of the expansor and compressor. Analytical calculations of the high-order dispersions introduced by this compressor and examples for a pulse with a central wavelength at 800 nm are presented.