Development of a Sub-Picosecond Tunable X-Ray Source at the LLNL Electron Linac

TL;DRAbstract

The use of ultrafast laser pulses to generate very high brightness, ultra short (fs to ps) pulses of x-rays is a topic of great interest to the x-ray user community. In principle, femtosecond-scale pump-probe experiments can be used to temporally resolve structural dynamics of materials on the time scale of atomic motion. The development of sub-ps x-ray pulses will make possible a wide range of materials and plasma physics studies with unprecedented time resolution. A current project at LLNL will provide such a novel x-ray source based on Thomson scattering of high power, short laser pulses with a high peak brightness, relativistic electron bunch. The system is based on a 5 mm-mrad normalized emittance photoinjector, a 100 MeV electron RF linac, and a 300 mJ, 35 fs solid-state laser system. The Thomson x-ray source produces ultra fast pulses with x-ray energies capable of probing into high-Z metals, and a high flux per pulse enabling single shot experiments. The system will also operat

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