Generation of high brightness electron beam by brake-applied velocity bunching with a relatively low energy chirp

Velocity bunching technique is a tool for compressing electron beams in modern high brightness photoinjector sources, which utilizes the velocity difference introduced by a traveling rf wave at a relatively low energy. It presents peculiar challenges when applied to obtain a beam with a very high current and a low transverse emittance in photoinjectors. The main difficulty is to control the emittance oscillations of the beam during high compression, which can be naturally considered as an extension of the emittance compensation process. In this paper, a brake-applied velocity bunching scheme is proposed, in which the electron bunch is injected into the accelerator with a low gradient at a deceleration phase, like “a brake is applied”, afterward slips to an acceleration phase. During the entire compression process, the energy chirp induced by the rf field is mostly linear, which retains a symmetric electron beam in the temporal distribution. The key point of the new scheme is a smaller energy chirp at a lower beam energy compared with the normal velocity bunching. Besides, the beam energy chirp before compression is dominated by the linear correlation due to a relatively short laser pulse. With a symmetric bunch compression, the transverse emittance could be compensated even if the compression factor is extremely high. As to our simulation results, the peak current of the compressed beam can be above 1.8 kA for the charge of 800 pC with a good emittance compensation.