Search

Electron bunches from a photoionized ultracold atomic gas enable the generation of spatially coherent soft-X-ray pulses trough inverse Compton scattering. Combined with at source prebunching, a compact, fully coherent soft X-ray source is proposed.

The ultrafast and ultracold electron source, based on near-threshold photoionisation of a laser-cooled and trapped atomic gas, offers a unique combination of low transverse beam emittance and high bunch charge. Its use is however still limited because of the required cold-atom laser-cooling techniques. Here we present a compact ultracold electron source based on a grating magneto-optical trap (GMOT), which only requires one trapping laser beam that passes through a transparent accelerator module. This makes the technique more widely accessible and increases its applicability. We show the GMOT can be operated with a hole in the center of the grating and with large electric fields applied across the trapping region, which is required for extracting electron bunches. The calculated values of the applied electric field were found to agree well with measured Stark shifts of the laser cooling transition. The electron beams extracted from the GMOT have been characterised. Beam energies up to 10 keV were measured using a time-of-flight method. The normalised root-mean-squared transverse beam emittance was determined using a waist scan method, resulting in $\epsilon = 1.9 \rm{nm}$. The root-mean-squared transverse size of the ionisation volume is $30 \mu\rm{m}$ or larger, implying an electron source temperature in the few-10K range, $2-3$ orders of magnitude lower than conventional electron sources, based on photoemission or thermionic emission from solid state surfaces.

© 2019 American Physical Society. Guiding of relativistically intense laser pulses with peak power of 0.85 PW over 15 diffraction lengths was demonstrated by increasing the focusing strength of a capillary discharge waveguide using laser inverse bremsstrahlung heating. This allowed for the production of electron beams with quasimonoenergetic peaks up to 7.8 GeV, double the energy that was previously demonstrated. Charge was 5 pC at 7.8 GeV and up to 62 pC in 6 GeV peaks, and typical beam divergence was 0.2 mrad.

An atomic rubidium beam formed in a 70-mm-long two-dimensional magneto-optical trap (2D MOT), directly loaded from a collimated Knudsen source, is analyzed using laser-induced fluorescence. The longitudinal velocity distribution, the transverse temperature, and the flux of the atomic beam are reported. The equivalent transverse reduced brightness of an ion beam with properties similar to the atomic beam is calculated because the beam is developed to be photoionized and applied in a focused ion beam. In a single two-dimensional magneto-optical trapping step, an equivalent transverse reduced brightness of (1.0+0.8−0.4)×106 A/(m2 sr eV) is achieved with a beam flux equivalent to (0.6+0.3−0.2) nA. The temperature of the beam is further reduced with an optical molasses after the 2D MOT. This optical molasses increases the equivalent brightness to (6+5−2)×106 A/(m2 sr eV). For currents below 10 pA, for which disorder-induced heating can be suppressed, this number is also a good estimate of the ion-beam brightness that can be expected. Such an ion-beam brightness would be a 6× improvement over the liquid-metal ion source and could improve the resolution in focused ion-beam nanofabrication.