Multiphoton time-delay spectroscopy using not transform-limited laser pulses

We report on a two-photon resonant three-photon ionisation experiment performed on atomic barium with a sequence of two identical not transform-limited laser pulses in the weak field regime. We show that our results, obtained by a multimode nanosecond laser source, can be reproduced theoretically by using much shorter transform-limited pulses with the same spectral bandwidth. © 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.