We present the first demonstration of THz-driven bunch compression and timing stabilization of a few-fC relativistic electron beam with kinetic energy of 2.5 MeV using quasi-single-cycle strong field THz radiation in a shorted parallel-plate structure. Compression by nearly a factor of 3 produced a 39 fs rms bunch length and a reduction in timing jitter by more than a factor of 2, to 31 fs rms, offering a significant improvement to beam performance for applications like ultrafast electron diffraction. This THz-driven technique provides a critical step towards unprecedented timing resolution in ultrafast sciences and other accelerator applications using femtosecond-scale electron beams.
@article{arxiv.1906.03358,
title = {Femtosecond compression dynamics and timing jitter suppression in a terahertz-driven electron bunch compressor},
author = {E. C. Snively and M. A. K. Othman and M. Kozina and B. K. Ofori-Okai and S. P. Weathersby and S. Park and X. Shen and X. J. Wang and M. C. Hoffmann and R. K. Li and E. A. Nanni},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1906.03358},
year = {2020}
}