Abstract
It has been known for some time that the steady-state pulse propagating inside a mode-locked laser is the optical equivalent of a mechanical flywheel. By measuring the timing error spectrum between phase-locked optical pulse trains emitted from two nearly identical 10 fs Ti:sapphire lasers, we demonstrate a record low integrated timing error of less than 13 as, measured from d.c. to the Nyquist frequency of the pulse train, which is 41 MHz. This corresponds to the lowest high-frequency phase noise ever recorded of –203 dBc Hz–1 (assuming a 10 GHz carrier) for offset frequencies greater than 1 MHz. Such a highly uniform train of pulses will enable the synchronization of pump–probe experiments that measure the evolution dynamics of chemical1,2 and atomic processes3,4 evolving on femtosecond and attosecond timescales. The ultralow timing jitter of such pulse trains will also allow photonic analog-to-digital conversion of mid-infrared waveforms with a resolution of 6 bits5.
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Acknowledgements
The authors acknowledge support from the Department of Energy (grant no. DE-SC0005262), the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (grant no. HR0011-05-C-0155), the National Science Foundation (grant no. ECCS-0900901) and the Air Force Office of Scientific Research (grant no. FA9550-10-1-0063). The authors are grateful for the loan of a pump laser by Coherent Inc and a Ti:sapphire laser from IdestaQE to pursue this study.
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F.X.K. initiated the project. J.G.F. helped with the detection circuit. A.J.B. designed the experimental set-up, acquired the phase noise data and performed the initial data analysis. A.J.B., F.X.K. and J.G.F. interpreted the data.
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Benedick, A., Fujimoto, J. & Kärtner, F. Optical flywheels with attosecond jitter. Nature Photon 6, 97–100 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2011.326
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nphoton.2011.326
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