Application of optical elements for temporal and spatial transformation of ultra-short and ultra-intense light pulses

The goal of the ELI (Extreme Light Infrastructure) project is to build a laser centre with the worlds highest power output pulsed laser in the locality of Dolni Brezany near Prague. Presented paper offers first glance to the insight into continuous and pulsed beam interaction with various optical systems which causes beam's spatial and temporal transformation. Complexity of this problem is illustrated in need of geometrical and physical optics knowledge, numerical simulations, material engineering and many others. This paper is focused on the field trace simulations in various software environments for both simple and more complex optical systems.