09.07.2024 / 16:00 - 18:00 / Hamburg, CFEL/building 99 in SR I-III on the ground floor

Lecture

Snapshots of Mike Downer: Snapshots of microbunched plasma-wakefield-accelerated electron beams

Mike Downer, University of Texas at Austin, USA (DESY, Photon Science)

Single-shot recovery of the 3D structure of few-fs wakefield-accelerated electron bunches by imaging their coherent optical transition radiation (COTR) from the generating film to an array of wavelength-filtered cameras [1] will be discussed. The intensity, wavelength-dependence, and shape of the multi-spectral image sets is correlated with the method of injecting electrons into the wake, and helps to quantify the e-bunch’s ability to seed a free-electron-laser instability. Unique reconstructions are obtained routinely for down-ramp-injected, infrequently for self-injected, and with help from simulations for ionization-injected bunches. Multi-spectral COTR imaging and its derivatives show promise as inline metrology for wakefield-accelerator-driven free-electron lasers. [1] M. LaBerge et al., “Revealing the three-dimensional structure of microbunched plasma-wakefield-accelerated electron beams,” Nat. Photon., in press (2024).