Attosecond stable dispersion-free delay line for easy ultrafast metrology

• Published in: Scientific reports Vol. 12; no. 1; p. 8525
• Main Authors: Tyagi, Akansha, Sidhu, Mehra S, Mandal, Ankur, Kapoor, Sanjay, Dahiya, Sunil, Rost, Jan M, Pfeifer, Thomas, Singh, Kamal P
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: England Nature Publishing Group 20.05.2022; Nature Publishing Group UK; Nature Portfolio
• Subjects: Cameras; Electric fields; Plasma; Science education; Sensors
• ISSN: 2045-2322; 2045-2322
• DOI: 10.1038/s41598-022-12348-5

We demonstrate a dispersion-free wavefront splitting attosecond resolved interferometric delay line for easy ultrafast metrology of broadband femtosecond pulses. Using a pair of knife-edge prisms, we symmetrically split and later recombine the two wavefronts with a few tens of attosecond resolution and stability and employ a single-pixel analysis of interference fringes with good contrast using a phone camera without any iris or nonlinear detector. Our all-reflective delay line is theoretically analyzed and experimentally validated by measuring 1st and 2nd order autocorrelations and the SHG-FROG trace of a NIR femtosecond pulse. Our setup is compact, offers attosecond stability with flexibility for independent beam-shaping of the two arms. Furthermore, we suggest that our compact and in-line setup can be employed for attosecond resolved pump-probe experiments of matter with few-cycle pulses.