Pulse duration and wavelength stability measurements of a midinfrared free-electron laser

We report the pulse duration and wavelength stability measurements of a midinfrared free-electron laser (FEL) where the wavelength fluctuation may not be negligible. The technique we employ is a fringe-resolved autocorrelation (FRAC) method that has good sensitivity on not only the pulse duration and the chirp but also the wavelength stability. By the simple manipulation of experimental FRAC signals, we can obtain the pulse duration even if the amounts of the chirp and the wavelength stability are not known in advance, which is further used to estimate the wavelength stability. Through this procedure we find that the pulse duration of the Kyoto University FEL at 12 μm is about 0.58 ps without any notable chirp, and the wavelength stability is about 1.3%. We also carry out separate experiments for intensity autocorrelation and sum-frequency mixing. The difference we find for pulse duration and wavelength stability by the different measurements is attributed to the different operation conditions of FEL.