Theoretical considerations on imaging of micron size electron beam with optical transition radiation

Optical transition radiation (OTR) has been widely used to image electron beam profile. In this paper, we systematically investigated the issues related to imaging of electron beam with OTR. It is found that the point-spread function (PSF) largely depends on the acceptance angle of the lens and is only very weakly dependent on beam energy and the distance from the OTR target to the lens. This excludes the potential obstacles to imaging of high-energy electron beam for which, the photons are emitted in a relatively small cone and the far field condition is hard to fulfill. The image of a whole beam is found by convoluting the real beam distribution with the PSF. It is shown that for micron size beam, the image formed with OTR largely deviates from the real beam distribution. And the real beam distribution could be restored from deconvoluting the image with the PSF. The effectiveness of the restoration is demonstrated, which opens up the possibility of measuring micron size beam profile with OTR.