Secondary wavelength stabilization of unbalanced Michelson interferometers for the generation of low-jitter pulse trains.

R J Shalloo,L Corner

doi:10.1364/ol.41.004068

Abstract

We present a double unbalanced Michelson interferometer producing up to four output pulses from a single input pulse. The interferometer is stabilized with the Hänsch-Couillaud method using an auxiliary low power continuous wave laser injected into the interferometer, allowing the stabilization of the temporal jitter of the output pulses to 0.02 fs. Such stabilized pulse trains would be suitable for driving multi-pulse laser wakefield accelerators, and the technique could be extended to include amplification in the arms of the interferometer.

Highlights

The pulse train has to be very stable, i.e., with a low timing jitter between the pulses. This is important, for example, if the pulses in the train have to be separated by exactly the plasma period, as is the case for MP-LWFA, or used to create electron bunches from a photocathode that are precisely timed to the rf phase of an accelerator
In this Letter, we present a method for stabilizing unbalanced interferometers using a secondary, continuous wave laser and HC locking
Provided that the path length difference between the two arms of the interferometer is less than the coherence length of the cw laser, we show it is possible to stabilize the interferometer with the cw laser alone and that a single pulsed laser input can be used to generate a pulse train from the interferometer at the same time

Summary

Introduction

For pulsed systems, locking requires the pulses from each arm of the interferometer to be temporally overlapped to provide an error signal for stabilization [13]; an interferometer designed to split one input pulse into a train cannot use these methods.

Results

Conclusion