Drift-free, 11 fs pulse delay stability in dual-arm PW-class laser systems

Abstract

Simultaneous ultra-intense pulses at petawatt laser facilities enable a broad range of experiments in nuclear photonics and strong field quantum electrodynamics. These experiments often require very precise control of the time delays between pulses. We report measurements of the time delay between the two 1 PW outputs of the Extreme Light Infrastructure - Nuclear Physics (ELI-NP) facility in Romania. The short-term standard deviation of the time delay was approximately half of the pulse duration of 23 fs, and the average delay drifted with up to 100 fs/h. The drift and sporadic delay jumps were corrected using a feedback loop, which reduced the long-term standard deviation of the delay close to its short-term value. These results imply that in ELI-NP experiments using two simultaneous pulses, a temporal overlap of better than half of the pulse duration can be achieved for more than two thirds of the shots, which would enable high data rate experiments using simultaneous petawatt pulses.