Sub-10 femtosecond stabilization of a fiber-link using a balanced optical cross-correlator

A drift free synchronization distribution system with femtosecond accuracy is of great interest for free-electron-lasers such as FLASH or the European XFEL. Stability at that level can be reached by distributing laser pulses from a mode-locked erbium-doped fiber laser over length-stabilized fiber-links. In this paper, we present a prototype of a fiber-link stabilization system based on balanced optical cross-correlation. The optical cross-correlation offers drift-free timing jitter detection. With this approach we were able to reduce the timing jitter added by a 400 m long fiber-link installed in a noisy accelerator environment to below 10 fs (rms).