RESUMEN
The SwissFEL soft X-ray free-electron laser (FEL) beamline Athos will be ready for user operation in 2021. Its design includes a novel layout of alternating magnetic chicanes and short undulator segments. Together with the APPLE X architecture of undulators, the Athos branch can be operated in different modes producing FEL beams with unique characteristics ranging from attosecond pulse length to high-power modes. Further space has been reserved for upgrades including modulators and an external seeding laser for better timing control. All of these schemes rely on state-of-the-art technologies described in this overview. The optical transport line distributing the FEL beam to the experimental stations was designed with the whole range of beam parameters in mind. Currently two experimental stations, one for condensed matter and quantum materials research and a second one for atomic, molecular and optical physics, chemical sciences and ultrafast single-particle imaging, are being laid out such that they can profit from the unique soft X-ray pulses produced in the Athos branch in an optimal way.
RESUMEN
We demonstrate a remote microwave/radio frequency (RF) transfer technique based on the stabilization of a fiber link using a fiber-loop optical-microwave phase detector (FLOM-PD). This method compensates for the excess phase fluctuations introduced in fiber transfer by direct phase comparison between the optical pulse train reflected from the remote site and the local microwave/RF signal using the FLOM-PD. This enables sub-fs resolution and long-term stable link stabilization while having a wide timing detection range and less of a demand in fiber dispersion compensation. The demonstrated fractional frequency instability between 2.856 GHz RF oscillators separated by a 2.3 km fiber link is 7.6×10(-18) and 6.5×10(-19) at 1000 and 82,500 s averaging times, respectively.
RESUMEN
Synchrotron infrared sources have become popular mainly because of their excellent broadband brilliance, which enables spectroscopically resolved spatial-mapping of stationary objects at the diffraction limit. In this article we focus on an often-neglected further advantage of such sources - their unique time-structure - to bring such broadband spectroscopy to the time domain, for studying dynamic phenomenon down to the 100 ps limit. We describe the ultra-broadband (12.5 to 1.1 µm) Fourier transform pump-probe setup, for condensed matter transmission- and reflection-spectroscopy, installed at the X01DC infrared beam-line of the Swiss Light Source (SLS). The optical pump consists of a widely tuneable 100 ps 1 kHz laser system, covering 94% of the 16 to 1.1 µm range. A thorough description of the system is given, including (i) the vector-modulator providing purely electronic tuning of the pump-probe overlap up to 1 ms with sub-ps time resolution, (ii) the 500 MHz data acquisition system interfaced with the experimental physics and industrial control system (EPICS) based SLS control system for consecutive pulse sampling, and (iii) the step-scan time-slice Fourier transform scheme for simultaneous recording of the dual-channel pumped, un-pumped, and difference spectra. The typical signal/noise ratio of a single interferogram in a 100 ps time slice is 300 (measured during one single 140 s TopUp period). This signal/noise ratio is comparable to that of existing gated Globar pump-probe Fourier transform spectroscopy, but brings up to four orders of magnitude better time resolution. To showcase the utility of broadband pump-probe spectroscopy, we investigate a Ge-on-Si material system similar to that in which optically pumped direct-gap lasing was recently reported. We show that the mid-infrared reflection-spectra can be used to determine the optically injected carrier density, while the mid- and near-infrared transmission-spectra can be used to separate the strong pump-induced absorption and inversion processes present at the direct-gap energy.
