Large-Scale Turnkey Timing Distribution System for New Generation Photon Science Facilities

We report a large-scale turnkey timing distribution system able to satisfy the most stringent synchronization requirements demanded by new generation light sources such as X-ray free-electron lasers and attoscience centers. Based on the pulsed-optical timing synchronization scheme, the system can serve 15 remote optical and microwave sources in parallel via timing stabilized fiber links. Relative timing jitter between two link outputs is less than 1 fs RMS integrated over an extended measurement time from 1 μs to 2.5 days. The current system is also able to generate stabilized microwaves at the link outputs with 25-fs RMS precision over 8 h, which can be easily improved to few-femtosecond regime with higher quality VCOs.