Femtosecond Laser Timing Measurement
January 1, 2012SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory Engineering/Physics, 2011-12
Liaison(s): Dr. Josef Frisch, Dr. Alan Fry, Dr. Justin May, Dr. David Schultz, Dr. Steven Smith, Dr. Tonee Smith, Dr. William White
Advisor(s): Qimin Yang, Richard Haskell
Students(s): Kevin Samrick (TL-S), Susan Tan (TL-F), Robert Hoyt, Michael Bowerman (S), Say Young (Josh) Cook (F), Chuhyon John Eom (F)
The SLAC clinic team is working with researchers from the LINAC Coherent Light Source, the world’s brightest X-ray laser. Our goal is to reduce timing errors that occur when synchronizing laser pulses in their pump-probe experiments. Since researchers believe the current 250 femtosecond (2.5×10-13 s) timing error is primarily caused by their photodiodes, the team built a timing platform to characterize the errors introduced by these de-vices.