SINGLE SHOT LONGITUDINAL BUNCH PROFILE MEASUREMENTS BY TEMPORALLY RESOLVED ELECTRO-OPTICAL DETECTION

For the high gain operation of a SASE FEL, extremely short electron bunches are essential to generate sufficiently high peak currents. At the superconducting linac of FLASH at DESY, we have installed an electro-optic measurement system to probe the time structure of the electric field of single ~100 fs electron bunches. In this technique, the field induced birefringence in an electro-optic crystal is encoded on a chirped picosecond laser pulse. The longitudinal electric field profile of the electron bunch is then obtained from the encoded optical pulse by a single shot cross correlation with a 35 fs laser pulse using a second harmonic crystal (temporal decoding). An electro-optical signal exhibiting a feature with 118 fs FWHM was observed, and this is close to the limit of resolution due to the material properties of the particular electro-optic crystal used. The measured electro-optic signals are compared to bunch shapes simultaneously measured with a transverse deflecting cavity