Ultrafast amplifier additive timing jitter characterization and control.

We report on the characterization and long-term compensation of additive timing jitter introduced by a femtosecond ytterbium regenerative amplifier with a 100 kHz repetition rate. A balanced optical cross-correlation technique is used to generate a jitter error signal. This approach is well suited to characterize the additive timing jitter of Yb amplifiers seeded by narrow spectrum Yb oscillators. The balanced optical cross-correlator is in a noncollinear configuration allowing a background free coindence detection. This setup enables the measurement of additive timing jitter from the amplifier, with a noise floor of 300 as integrated from 10 Hz to 10 kHz. The measured additive timing jitter level is about 5 fs, integrated from 0.1 Hz to 10 kHz. The amplifier timing drift characterization and control are performed for more than an hour.