"An orchestra of light: advanced timing distribution and light wave synthesis"

"Kilometer scale free-electron lasers will reach their full potential in providing molecular movies if all laser and rf-sources involved in the facility can be timed and synchronized to at least 10-fs precision with scalability to potentially 100 attoseconds in the future. A set of ultrafast optical techniques for long-term stable femtosecond synchronization of large-scale X-ray free-electron lasers will be presented and performance scaling towards sub-femtsecond precision will be demonstrated. Sub-cycle optical waveforms with spectra spanning multiple octaves are desired for efficient attosecond pulse generation and multi-wavelength spectroscopy. It turns out that some of the techniques invented for large scale timing distribution can be used to coherently stich few-cycle optical pulses together. Progress towards a multi-Joule optical waveform synthesizer covering 500 Nanometer – 2.5 micrometers will be presented and potential applications are discussed."