Interferometric Measurement of Bunch Length of a 3Mev Picocoulomb Electron Beam

We report the bunch length measurement of low-energy 3 MeV electron beams in picosecond regime with the charge from 1.0 to 14 pC. It is the first time that we demonstrate single-cycle nano-joule coherent terahertz (THz) radiation from 3MeV electron beam can be meas-ured via a far-infrared Michelson interferometer using a QOD. At this low energy range, when charge is about 1 pC, the signal from the conventional helium-cooled sili-con composite bolometer is too low. Compared to the bunch length measurement via the ultrafast-laser-pump and electron-beam-probe in the timescale 10⁻¹⁴ to 10-12 s which is determined by the phase-transition dynamics in solids, the advantages are: there are no needs of pump laser and probe sample, greatly simplifying the experi-ment; the timing jitter between laser and electron beams contributes no error to the bunch length measurement; furthermore, the method can be extended to sub-picosecond regime enabling bunch length measurement in a much broader timescale 10-14 to 10-11 s for low-energy electron beams. In the current experiment the bunch length is limited to 1 ps only because the setup of driving laser to cathode with a large 70° incident angle, effective-ly lengthening the laser pulse to ≥1 ps.
Proceedings of the 10th Int. Particle Accelerator Conf., IPAC2019, Melbourne, Australia