No Arabic abstract
We propose and demonstrate a novel method to reduce the pulse width and timing jitter of a relativistic electron beam through THz-driven beam compression. In this method the longitudinal phase space of a relativistic electron beam is manipulated by a linearly polarized THz pulse in a dielectric tube such that the bunch tail has a higher velocity than the bunch head, which allows simultaneous reduction of both pulse width and timing jitter after passing through a drift. In this experiment, the beam is compressed by more than a factor of four from 130 fs to 28 fs with the arrival time jitter also reduced from 97 fs to 36 fs, opening up new opportunities in using pulsed electron beams for studies of ultrafast dynamics. This technique extends the well known rf buncher to the THz frequency and may have a strong impact in accelerator and ultrafast science facilities that require femtosecond electron beams with tight synchronization to external lasers.
We propose and demonstrate a novel method to produce few-femtosecond electron beam with relatively low timing jitter. In this method a relativistic electron beam is compressed from about 150 fs (rms) to about 7 fs (rms, upper limit) with the wakefield at THz frequency produced by a leading drive beam in a dielectric tube. By imprinting the energy chirp in a passive way, we demonstrate through laser-driven THz streaking technique that no additional timing jitter with respect to an external laser is introduced in this bunch compression process, a prominent advantage over the conventional method using radio-frequency bunchers. We expect that this passive bunching technique may enable new opportunities in many ultrashort-beam based advanced applications such as ultrafast electron diffraction and plasma wakefield acceleration.
Coulomb interaction between charged particles is a well-known phenomenon in many areas of researches. In general the Coulomb repulsion force broadens the pulse width of an electron bunch and limits the temporal resolution of many scientific facilities such as ultrafast electron diffraction and x-ray free-electron lasers. Here we demonstrate a scheme that actually makes use of Coulomb force to compress a relativistic electron beam. Furthermore, we show that the Coulomb-driven bunch compression process does not introduce additional timing jitter, which is in sharp contrast to the conventional radio-frequency buncher technique. Our work not only leads to enhanced temporal resolution in electron beam based ultrafast instruments that may provide new opportunities in probing material systems far from equilibrium, but also opens a promising direction for advanced beam manipulation through self-field interactions.
We present the first demonstration of THz-driven bunch compression and timing stabilization of a few-fC relativistic electron beam with kinetic energy of 2.5 MeV using quasi-single-cycle strong field THz radiation in a shorted parallel-plate structure. Compression by nearly a factor of 3 produced a 39 fs rms bunch length and a reduction in timing jitter by more than a factor of 2, to 31 fs rms, offering a significant improvement to beam performance for applications like ultrafast electron diffraction. This THz-driven technique provides a critical step towards unprecedented timing resolution in ultrafast sciences and other accelerator applications using femtosecond-scale electron beams.
In modern high-gain free-electron lasers, ultra-fast photon pulses designed for studying chemical, atomic and biological systems are generated from a serial of behaviors of high-brightness electron beam at the time-scale ranging from several hundred femtoseconds to sub-femtosecond. Currently, radiofrequency transverse deflectors are widely used to provide reliable, single-shot electron beam phase space diagnostics, with a temporal resolution of femtosecond. Here, we show that the time resolution limitations caused by the intrinsic beam size in transverse deflectors, can be compensated with specific transverse-to-longitudinal coupling elements. For the purpose, an undulator with transverse gradient field is introduced before the transverse deflector. With this technique, a resolution of less than 1fs root mean square has been theoretically demonstrated for measuring the longitudinal profile and/or the micro-bunching of the electron bunch.
A dielectric-loaded linac powered by THz-pulses is one of the key parts of the Attosecond X-ray Science: Imaging and Spectroscopy (AXSIS) project at DESY, Hamburg. As in conventional accelerators, the AXSIS linac is designed to have phase velocity equal to the speed of light which, in this case, is realized by tuning the thickness of the dielectric layer and the radius of the vacuum channel. Therefore, structure fabrication errors will lead to a change in the beam dynamics and beam quality. Additionally, errors in the bunch injection will also affect the acceleration process and can cause beam loss on the linac wall. This paper numerically investigates the process of electron beam acceleration in the AXSIS linac, taking into account the aforementioned errors. Particle tracking simulations were done using the code ECHO, which uses a low-dispersive algorithm for the field calculation and was specially adapted for the dielectric-loaded accelerating structures.