Abstract
We present a novel method for measuring the duration of femtosecond x-ray pulses from self-amplified spontaneous emission free electron lasers by performing statistical analysis in the spectral domain. Analytical expressions of the spectral correlation function were derived in the linear regime to extract both the pulse duration and the spectrometer resolution. Numerical simulations confirmed that the method can be also used in the nonlinear regime. The method was demonstrated experimentally at the Linac Coherent Light Source by measuring pulse durations down to 13 fs FWHM.
Highlights
The Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory is the world’s first hard x-ray free-electron laser (FEL) source that began lasing in 2009 [1] and is in user operation, supporting a wide range of scientific research including physics, structural biology, energy, chemistry, and material science
We present a novel method for measuring the x-ray pulse duration through the analysis of the statistical properties of the spontaneous emission (SASE) FEL spectra
We considered the case when the average spike width is much narrower than the FEL bandwidth, and the spectrometer resolution width is much narrower than the FEL bandwidth as well
Summary
The Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory is the world’s first hard x-ray free-electron laser (FEL) source that began lasing in 2009 [1] and is in user operation, supporting a wide range of scientific research including physics, structural biology, energy, chemistry, and material science. An FEL x-ray source, such as the LCLS, is based on the so-called self-amplified spontaneous emission (SASE) process It exhibits three unique properties: ultrafast pulse duration ranging from a few to hundreds of femtoseconds, ultrahigh peak brightness that is many orders of magnitude greater than the brightest storage-ring based synchrotron sources, and nearly full spatial coherence in the transverse directions. The development of an appropriate diagnostic tool for ‘‘seeing’’ the exact temporal details, including such simple measurement as the pulse duration, has proven to be very challenging and elusive This is largely due to the vanishingly small cross sections in nonlinear processes at x-ray wavelengths that make temporal correlation techniques, commonly used in the optical regime, exceedingly difficult.
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