Ultrafast time-domain spectroscopy system using 10 GHz asynchronous optical sampling with 100 kHz scan rate

An ultrafast time-domain spectroscopy system employing asynchronous optical sampling at a repetition rate of 10 GHz is presented. Two ultra-compact Ti:sapphire femtosecond ring lasers allow to achieve scan rates as high as 100 kHz for a 100 ps long time window and a time-delay resolution of 100 fs. The feasibility of this high-speed ASOPS system is evaluated by performing THz time domain spectroscopy on molecular gases where signal-to-noise ratios exceeding 30 dB for averaging times in the millisecond range have been obtained. In order to demonstrate the benefits of this system for ultrafast pump-probe spectroscopy we demonstrate the high-sensitivity detection of coherent acoustic phonons with dephasing times in the range of the 100 ps time window.