Electro-Optical Bunch Length Detection at the European XFEL

The electro-optical bunch length detection system based on electro-optic spectral decoding has been installed and is being commissioned at the European XFEL. The system is capable of recording individual longitudinal bunch profiles with sub-picosecond resolution at a bunch repetition rate of 1.13MHz . Bunch lengths and arrival times of entire bunch trains with single-bunch resolution have been measured as well as jitter and drifts for consecutive bunch trains. In addition, we are testing a second electro-optical detection strategy, the so-called photonic time-stretching, which consists of imprinting the electric field of the bunch onto a chirped laser pulse, and then 'stretching' the output pulse by optical means. As a result, we obtain is a slowed down 'optical replica' of the bunch shape, which can be recorded using a photodiode and GHz-range acquisition. These tests are performed in parallel with the existing spectral decoding technique based on a spectrometer in order to allow a comparative study. In this paper, we present first results for both detection strategies from electron bunches after the second bunch compressor of the European XFEL