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Pulses having durations as short as 60 fsec have been directly generated by a self-mode-locked, dispersion-compensated Ti:sapphire laser. By using an extracavity fiber-prism pulse compressor, pulse durations as short as 45 fsec have been obtained.
We demonstrate that a combination of prisms and diffraction gratings can provide not only quadratic but also cubic phase compensation of ultrashort optical pulses. We obtain compressed pulses as short as 6 fsec.