Femtosecond visualization of laser-induced optical relativistic electron microbunches.
It has long been known that lasers can interact with relativistic electrons in magnetic undulators to imprint sinusoidal modulations that can be used to slice electrons into microbunches equally separated at the laser wavelength. Here we report on the first direct measurement of laser-induced microbunching of a relativistic electron beam with femtosecond resolution in the time domain. Using a modified zero-phasing technique to map the electron beam's temporal structures into the energy space, we show that this method can be used to directly quantify the time and spectral content of coherent current modulations imprinted on the beam for harmonic and multicolor lasing applications in accelerator-based light sources.
Key Laboratory for Laser Plasmas (Ministry of Education), Department of Physics and Astronomy, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, China.
Dao
D
Xiang
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Menlo Park, California 94025, USA.
Erik
E
Hemsing
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Menlo Park, California 94025, USA.
Michael
M
Dunning
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Menlo Park, California 94025, USA.
Carsten
C
Hast
SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Menlo Park, California 94025, USA.
Tor
T
Raubenheimer