Pierre Agostini's experiment illuminated an argon jet with an annular beam. A pinhole removed the annulus; a tungsten-coated mirror relayed harmonics and weak central reference into another argon jet. A magnetic-bottle electron spectrometer used time of flight and microchannel plate detectors. Glass plates varied delay. Reference-on sidebands contrasted with reference-off peaks. Atomic-phase-corrected reconstruction yielded -attosecond bursts.[ref]
The two-path attosecond phase reconstruction explains the control's purpose: adding the reference opens an interference channel. Its fitted oscillation tests phase relationships under the weak-field and atomic-response model. It does not independently reveal every target phase or an arbitrary nonperiodic optical pulse.
Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier shared the award equally for experimental methods generating attosecond light pulses to study Electron dynamics in matter.[ref]