We propose and demonstrate a novel method to produce few-femtosecond electron beam with relatively low timing jitter. In this method a relativistic electron beam is compressed from about 150 fs (rms) to about 7 fs (rms, upper limit) with the wakefield at THz frequency produced by a leading drive beam in a dielectric tube. By imprinting the energy chirp in a passive way, we demonstrate through laser-driven THz streaking technique that no additional timing jitter with respect to an external laser is introduced in this bunch compression process, a prominent advantage over the conventional method using radio-frequency bunchers. We expect that this passive bunching technique may enable new opportunities in many ultrashort-beam based advanced applications such as ultrafast electron diffraction and plasma wakefield acceleration.
@article{arxiv.1806.10804,
title = {Few-femtosecond Electron Beam with THz-frequency Wakefield-driven Compression},
author = {Lingrong Zhao and Tao Jiang and Chao Lu and Rui Wang and Zhe Wang and Pengfei Zhu and Yanchao Shi and Wei Song and Xiaoxin Zhu and Chunguang Jing and Sergey Antipov and Dao Xiang and Jie Zhang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1806.10804},
year = {2018}
}