3 research outputs found
Femtosecond resolution timing jitter correction on a TW scale Ti:sapphire laser system for FEL pump-probe experiments
Intense ultrashort pulse lasers are used for fs resolution pumpprobe
experiments more and more at large scale facilities, such as free electron
lasers (FEL). Measurement of the arrival time of the laser pulses and
stabilization to the machine or other sub-systems on the target, is crucial for
high time-resolution measurements. In this work we report on a single shot,
spectrally resolved, non-collinear cross-correlator with sub-fs resolution.
With a feedback applied we keep the output of the TW class Ti:sapphire
amplifier chain in time with the seed oscillator to ~3 fs RMS level for several
hours. This is well below the typical pulse duration used at FELs and supports
fs resolution pump-probe experiments. Short term jitter and long term timing
drift measurements are presented. Applicability to other wavelengths and
integration into the timing infrastructure of the FEL are also covered to show
the full potential of the device
SwissFEL: The Swiss X-ray Free Electron Laser
The SwissFEL X-ray Free Electron Laser (XFEL) facility started construction at the Paul Scherrer Institute (Villigen, Switzerland) in 2013 and will be ready to accept its first users in 2018 on the Aramis hard X-ray branch. In the following sections we will summarize the various aspects of the project, including the design of the soft and hard X-ray branches of the accelerator, the results of SwissFEL performance simulations, details of the photon beamlines and experimental stations, and our first commissioning results