Ultrafast electron diffractometer with Terahertz-driven pulse compression

Abstract

Terahertz (THz)-based electron manipulation has recently been shown to hold tremendous promise as a technology for manipulating and driving the next-generation of compact ultrafast electron sources. Here, we demonstrate an ultrafast electron diffractometer with THz-driven pulse compression. The electron bunches from a conventional DC gun are compressed by a factor of 10 and reach a duration of ~180 fs (FWHM) with 10,000 electrons/pulse at a 1 kHz repetition rate. The resulting ultrafast electron source is used in a proof-of-principle experiment to probe the photoinduced dynamics of single-crystal silicon. The THz-compressed electron beams produce high-quality diffraction patterns and enable observation of the ultrafast structural dynamics with improved time resolution. These results validate the maturity of THz-driven ultrafast electron sources for use in precision applications.

16 pages, 5 figures. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1910.06639

References in corpus (5)

• Compression of sub-relativistic space-charge-dominated electron bunches for single-shot femtosecond electron diffraction
• Segmented Terahertz Electron Accelerator and Manipulator (STEAM)
• Direct measurement of sub-10 fs relativistic electron beams with ultralow emittance
• Femtosecond compression dynamics and timing jitter suppression in a terahertz-driven electron bunch compressor
• Femtosecond relativistic electron beam with reduced timing jitter from THz-driven beam compression