Streaking spectroscopy for femtosecond applications and FEL development

Program Description

We have developed X-ray pulse diagnostics based on time-resolved photoelectron streaking spectroscopy that can now be used to determine the FEL X-ray pulse profile and arrival time with single-femtosecond precision.

Using these tools we have implemented an all-optical synchronization network at the free-electron laser FLASH, where facility-wide synchronization to better than 30 fs was achieved and sub-10 fs performance is expected in the future. Our plans to leverage these diagnostics in the first demonstration of X-ray Chirped Pulse Amplification and to use a variant of these techniques to explore intensity dependent Auger decay lifetimes will also be discussed.