Delay control in attosecond pump-probe experiments

The time delay between the pump and probe pulses in attosecond time-resolved experiments, such as attosecond streaking, is commonly introduced by splitting and recombining the two pulses in an interferometer. This technique suffers from instability in the optical path lengths of the two arms due to mechanical vibration of the optical elements and fluctuating environmental conditions. We present a technique with which the instability of the unconventional interferometer is suppressed while at the same time the time delay is controlled to within 20 as RMS using a feedback loop. Using this scheme, the streaked spectrogram of an attosecond pulse was measured. (C) 2009 Optical Society of America