Few-femtosecond-resolution characterization and suppression of excess timing jitter and drift in indoor atmospheric frequency comb transfer

We characterize the timing jitter spectral density of the time-of-flight (TOF) in the indoor atmospheric transfer of optical pulse train over 10 decades of Fourier frequency range (10 mu Hz - 100 kHz) with sub-100-as resolution using a balanced optical cross-correlator (BOC). Based on the well-known theory for atmospheric transfer of a laser beam, we could fit the measured timing jitter power spectral density to the theory and analyze it with a fairly good agreement from 20 mHz to 10 Hz Fourier frequency range. Moreover, we demonstrate that the BOC-based timing stabilization method can suppress the excess fluctuations in timing from >200 fs (rms) to 2.6 fs (rms) maintained over 130 hours when an optical pulse train is transferred over a 76.2-m long free-space beam path in laboratory environment. The demonstrated stabilization result corresponds to 4 x 10(-20) overlapping Allan deviation at 117,000s averaging time. (C) 2014 Optical Society of America