"Measure and Sort" approach to reduce jitter in femtosecond pump-probe experiments

In spite of the recent advent of few fs pulse X-ray free-electron laser sources, so far, synchronization between optical lasers and X-ray pulses has been challenging, and the jitter, typically, 100~200 fs r.m.s., has limited the time-resolution of the measurement. At the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS), Stanford, scientists have recently solved this problem by introducing a "measure-and-sort" approach, which records all single-shot data with time information to ensure resorting of the data. In the beamline, the same optical laser beam is split into three beams: with the first, the relative delay between laser and X-ray is encoded into wavelength by using a broadband chirped supercontinuum; in the second, the temporal delay is spatially encoded; in the third, pump-probe experiments are performed with time-sorting tools. It was concluded that the error in the delay time between optical and X-ray pulses can be substantially improved to 6 fs r.m.s., leading to time-resolved measurement with only a few fs resolution. For more information, see the paper, "Achieving few-femtosecond time-sorting at hard X-ray free-electron lasers", M. Harmand et al., Nature Photonics, doi:10.1038/nphoton.2013.11; published online, February 17, 2013.