Streaking of photoelectrons with optical lasers has been widely used for temporal characterization of attosecond extreme ultraviolet pulses. Recently, this technique has been adapted to characterize femtosecond x-ray pulses in free-electron lasers with the streaking imprinted by farinfrared and Terahertz (THz) pulses. Here, we report successful implementation of THz streaking for time-stamping of an ultrashort relativistic electron beam of which the energy is several orders of magnitude higher than photoelectrons. Such ability is especially important for MeV ultrafast electron diffraction (UED) applications where electron beams with a few femtosecond pulse width may be obtained with longitudinal compression while the arrival time may fluctuate at a much larger time scale. Using this laser-driven THz streaking technique, the arrival time of an ultrashort electron beam with 6 fs (rms) pulse width has been determined with 1.5 fs (rms) accuracy. Furthermore, we have proposed and demonstrated a non-invasive method for correction of the timing jitter with femtosecond accuracy through measurement of the compressed beam energy, which may allow one to advance UED towards sub-10 fs frontier far beyond the ∼100 fs (rms) jitter.

The simulation optimization and an experimental demonstration of improved performances of mega-electron-volt ultrafast electron diffraction (MeV UED) are reported in this paper. Using ultrashort high quality electron pulses from an S-band photocathode rf gun and a polycrystalline aluminum foil as the sample, we experimentally demonstrated an improved spatial resolution of MeV UED, in which the Debye-Scherrer rings of the (111) and (200) planes were clearly resolved. This result showed that MeV UED is capable to achieve an atomic level spatial resolution and a approximately 100 fs temporal resolution simultaneously, and will be a unique tool for ultrafast structural dynamics studies.

Collinear wakefield acceleration has been long established as a method capable of generating ultrahigh acceleration gradients. Because of the success on this front, recently, more efforts have shifted towards developing methods to raise the transformer ratio (TR). This figure of merit is defined as the ratio of the peak acceleration field behind the drive bunch to the peak deceleration field inside the drive bunch. TR is always less than 2 for temporally symmetric drive bunch distributions and therefore recent efforts have focused on generating asymmetric distributions to overcome this limitation. In this Letter, we report on using the emittance-exchange method to generate a shaped drive bunch to experimentally demonstrate a TR≈5 in a dielectric wakefield accelerator.

We have demonstrated single-shot continuously time-resolved MeV ultrafast electron diffraction using a static single crystal gold sample. An MeV high density electron pulse was used to probe the sample and then streaked by an rf deflecting cavity. The single-shot, high quality, streaked diffraction pattern allowed structural information within several picoseconds to be continuously temporally resolved with an approximately 200 fs resolution. The temporal resolution can be straightforwardly improved to 100 fs by increasing the streaking strength. We foresee that this system would become a powerful tool for ultrafast structural dynamics studies.

A Compact Linear Collider prototype traveling-wave accelerator structure fabricated at Tsinghua University was recently high-gradient tested at the High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK). This X-band structure showed good high-gradient performance of up to 100 MV=m and obtained a breakdown rate of 1.27 × 10 −8 per pulse per meter at a pulse length of 250 ns. This performance was similar to that of previous structures tested at KEK and the test facility at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN), thereby validating the assembly and bonding of the fabricated structure. Phenomena related to vacuum breakdown were investigated and are discussed in the present study. Evaluation of the breakdown timing revealed a special type of breakdown occurring in the immediately succeeding pulse after a usual breakdown. These breakdowns tended to occur at the beginning of the rf pulse, whereas usual breakdowns were uniformly distributed in the rf pulse. The high-gradient test was conducted under the international collaboration research program among Tsinghua University, CERN, and KEK.