Abstract
Streaking of photoelectrons with optical lasers has been widely used for temporal characterization of attosecond extreme ultraviolet pulses. Recently, this technique has been adapted to characterize femtosecond x-ray pulses in free-electron lasers with the streaking imprinted by farinfrared and Terahertz (THz) pulses. Here, we report successful implementation of THz streaking for time-stamping of an ultrashort relativistic electron beam of which the energy is several orders of magnitude higher than photoelectrons. Such ability is especially important for MeV ultrafast electron diffraction (UED) applications where electron beams with a few femtosecond pulse width may be obtained with longitudinal compression while the arrival time may fluctuate at a much larger time scale. Using this laser-driven THz streaking technique, the arrival time of an ultrashort electron beam with 6 fs (rms) pulse width has been determined with 1.5 fs (rms) accuracy. Furthermore, we have proposed and demonstrated a non-invasive method for correction of the timing jitter with femtosecond accuracy through measurement of the compressed beam energy, which may allow one to advance UED towards sub-10 fs frontier far beyond the ~100 fs (rms) jitter.
Highlights
Ultrafast phenomena are typically studied with a pumpprobe technique in which the dynamics are initiated by a pump laser and probed by a delayed pulse [1]
We report successful implementation of THz streaking for time stamping of an ultrashort relativistic electron beam, whose energy is several orders of magnitude higher than photoelectrons
Such an ability is especially important for MeV ultrafast electron diffraction (UED) applications, where electron beams with a few femtosecond pulse width may be obtained with longitudinal compression, while the arrival time may fluctuate at a much larger timescale
Summary
Ultrafast phenomena are typically studied with a pumpprobe technique in which the dynamics are initiated by a pump laser and probed by a delayed pulse [1]. While the rf buncher technique has been widely used in the UED community and, very recently, a relativistic electron beam as short as 7 fs (rms) has been produced [30], it is realized that the space charge force induced pulse broadening was solved at the cost of increasing timing jitter This is because the phase jitter in the rf cavity leads to beam energy jitter, which is further converted into timing jitter at the sample [19,35]. A noninvasive method for correcting the timing jitter of a compressed beam through measurement of the compressed beam energy has been proposed and demonstrated This noninvasive time-stamping method is easy to implement and can be applied to both keV and MeV UED to significantly improve the temporal resolution to a potentially sub-10-fs regime
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