The working principle of PulseSlicer is to disperse the pulses spatially through an optical system, then control the dispersed spectrum through a template on the back plane, and finally re align the output, thereby cutting out a narrow spectral pulse in the ultrafast laser pulse, which looks similar to the effect of a narrowband filter. Conventional laser sources can only generate fixed or slightly varying pulses, while pulse slicers, as an economical way, can obtain rich narrow linewidth pulses through spectral clipping.

Spectral clipping also affects pulse width, such as in the case of titanium sapphire lasersThe 800nm output linewidth is 7nm, and after spectral clipping, the linewidth is reduced to 0.35nm. At the same time, the pulse width is widened from 140fs to 2700fs. In addition, the total power of narrow linewidth pulses will also decrease accordingly. But for some applications, total power and pulse width are not the most important.