In this work we provide theoretical background for the analysis of second-order correlation functions in experiments performed at soft x-ray free-electron lasers (XFELs). Typically, beamlines XFELs are equipped by variable line spacing (VLS) monochromators. We perform examination beam propagation through such VLS monochromator taking specially into account interplay between finite resolution an...

Some of the causes of this curvature are controlled by the instrument design or by the experimental conditions used. The degree of curvature for nickel at the 232.0 nm wavelength, for instance, is controlled by the spectral bandwidth chosen on the monochromator, because the curvature arises from overlap of a nearby nonabsorbed line in the nickel spectrum. At practical instrument settings, it is...

We evaluate the shape and chirp of nanosecond pulses from a fiber laser passively mode locked with a nanotube-based saturable absorber by using a synchronously scanning streak camera and a monochromator to directly measure the pulse spectrogram. We show that the stable sech(2) output pulse possesses a predominantly linear chirp, with a residual quartic phase and low noise. Comparison with analy...