Precise time measurement in sub-femtosecond by the use of X-ray free-electron laser

It is now known that X-ray free-electron lasers can produce ultrafast X-ray pulses as short as 3 fs in FWHM. Scientists at the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS), Stanford are trying to reduce delay time errors in optical-pump & X-ray probe measurements to the 1 fs level, by 2D spectrogram measurement of the relative X-ray/optical delay. For more information, see the paper, "Sub-femtosecond precision measurement of relative X-ray arrival time for free-electron lasers", N. Hartmann et al., Nature Photonics, 8, 706 (2014).