PIER Photon Science Colloquium: An Orchestra of Light: Advanced Timing Distribution and Light Wave Synthesis
by
Franz Kärtner(DESY CFEL and University of Hamburg, The Hamburg Centre for Ultrafast Imaging CUI, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA)
→
Europe/Berlin
CFEL Lecture Hall, Bldg. 99 (DESY Hamburg)
CFEL Lecture Hall, Bldg. 99
DESY Hamburg
Description
Kilometer scale free-electron lasers will reach their full potential in providing molecular movies if all laser and rf-sources involved in the facility can be timed and synchronized to at least 10-fs precision with scalability to potentially 100 attoseconds in the future. A set of ultrafast optical techniques for long-term stable femtosecond synchronization of large-scale X-ray free-electron lasers will be presented and performance scaling towards sub-femtosecond precision will be demonstrated.
Sub-cycle optical waveforms with spectra spanning multiple octaves are desired for efficient attosecond pulse generation and multi-wavelength spectroscopy. It turns out that some of the techniques invented for large scale timing distribution can be used to coherently stitch few-cycle optical pulses together. Progress towards a multi-Joule optical waveform synthesizer covering 500 nm – 2.5 µm will be presented and potential applications are discussed.