April 24, 2019
A team of CANDLE researchers, headed by Dr. Arsham Yeremyan, has successfully implemented a setup for the production of picosecond time-separated electron bunches on AREAL linac. The new setup is based on a variable delay-line installed on the path of the AREAL laser. When passing through this line, each laser pulse is split into a pair of time-separated pulses which are subsequently used to produce a sequence of electron bunches.
The relative timing of electron bunches can be varied in the range from 0 to tens of picosecond. Moreover, the ratio of charge carried by two bunches can be set to a desirable value by finely tuning the energy contrast of the laser pulse pair.
The availability of stacked electron bunches with fine-tuned temporal delay opens up a whole range of potential applications and experiments on transient phenomena in irradiated biological and inorganic materials, advanced accelerator concepts, etc.