Precise manipulation on spike train of uneven duration or delay pulses with a time grating system

In this paper, we proposed a time grating system to achieve spike train of uneven duration or delay (STUD) pulses, and theoretically study their features under various modulation conditions. This time grating scheme, which is a temporal analogy of spatial grating, introduces great degree of freedom for controlling the output pulse characteristics (pulse width, repetition rate, pulse shape, etc.) through simply tuning the electronics elements and the programmable phase modulation function. The narrowest pulse width is highly determined by the modulation parameters and the branch number N, and the numerically obtained value is around tens of femtoseconds in the current case. When super-Gaussian pulses are modulated with an optimized and modified trapezoidal function, the pulse rising/falling edge can be greatly compressed to form a clean nearly-square wave (with edges less than 10 fs). STUD pulses generated with this time grating system have high-degree controllability and are very beneficial for suppressing parametric instabilities in laser driven inertial confinement fusion.