Ultrafast amplifier additive timing jitter characterization and control

Alexis Casanova (1, 2, 3) , Quentin D’acremont (3, 1) , Giorgio Santarelli (2) , Stefan Dilhaire (3) , Antoine Courjaud (1)

1 Amplitude Systèmes
2 LP2N - Laboratoire Photonique, Numérique et Nanosciences
3 LOMA - Laboratoire Ondes et Matière d'Aquitaine

We report on the characterization and long-term compensation of additive timing jitter introduced by a femtosecond ytterbium regenerative amplifier with a 100 kHz repetition rate. A balanced optical cross-correlation technique is used to generate a jitter error signal. This approach is well suited to characterize the additive timing jitter of Yb amplifiers seeded by narrow spectrum Yb oscillators. The balanced optical cross-correlator is in a noncollinear configuration allowing a background free coindence detection. This setup enables the measurement of additive timing jitter from the amplifier, with a noise floor of 300 as integrated from 10 Hz to 10 kHz. The measured additive timing jitter level is about 5 fs, integrated from 0.1 Hz to 10 kHz. The amplifier timing drift characterization and control are performed for more than an hour.

Mots clés: Lasers and laser optics; Instrumentation and measurement and metrology; Ultrafast optics

Domaines: Optique [physics.optics]

Alexis Casanova, Quentin D’acremont, Giorgio Santarelli, Stefan Dilhaire, Antoine Courjaud. Ultrafast amplifier additive timing jitter characterization and control. Optics Letters, 2016, 41 (5), pp.898-900. ⟨10.1364/OL.41.000898⟩. ⟨hal-01300501⟩