Monitoring of electron bunch length by using Terahertz coherent transition radiation

In this paper, ultrashort bunch length monitoring was demonstrated based on Terahertz (THz) coherent transition radiation (CTR) in Tsinghua Thomson scattering X-ray (TTX) source. The radiation produced by electron bunch is split into three paths: one of them is used to detect the total energy, while the other two paths are filtered with different THz band-pass filters before detection. The bunch length variation can be obtained by calculating the ratio between the filtered energy and the total energy. The bunch is compressed by a chicane and via changing the current of chicane, the ratio of filtered energy and total energy changed correspondingly. It is a simple supplemental approach to monitor the bunch length during beam conditioning and facility operation. Bunch arrival-time jitter and nonlinear effects in chicane are observed in the experiment during the measurement of filtered energy and total energy.