Darmstadt 2008 – scientific programme
Parts | Days | Selection | Search | Downloads | Help
Q: Fachverband Quantenoptik und Photonik
Q 49: Ultrakurze Laserpulse (Anwendungen II)
Q 49.8: Talk
Thursday, March 13, 2008, 18:15–18:30, 3H
Attosecond relative timing jitter from a two-branch femtosecond Er:fiber laser — •Alexander Sell1, Florian Adler1, 2, Rupert Huber1, and Alfred Leitenstorfer1 — 1Department of Physics, University of Konstanz, 78464 Konstanz, Germany — 2JILA, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado 80309-0440, USA
We present the first direct measurement of the relative timing jitter between the parallel pulse trains of two erbium-doped fiber amplifiers which share the same femtosecond seed oscillator. The system is operated without active stabilization. Each amplifier branch provides independently tunable pulses in the near infrared (tuning range: 1.0 µm to 2.4 µm) with durations down to 12 fs, generated via four wave mixing in a highly nonlinear dispersion shifted bulk fiber. Employing an interferometric optical cross-correlator, the phase noise spectral density is measured with high sensitivity in a range from 1 Hz up to the Nyquist frequency of 24.5 MHz. The integrated timing jitter amounts to 11 attoseconds directly after the amplifier stages and 43 as after propagation through free-space optics and nonlinear fibers for frequency conversion. Multi-branch fiber lasers are thus promising seed sources for important applications such as phase stable, tunable difference frequency generation, field resolved spectroscopy or high-harmonic generation.