Generation of quasiequally spaced ultrashort microbunches in a photocathode rf gun

A photocathode rf gun can generate trains of THz subpicosecond electron bunches by illuminating the cathode with trains of laser pulses, but it suffers from the increasing charge in the beam. The THz structure blurs and tends to disappear when the longitudinal space charge forces begin to play a significant role in the beam evolution. In this paper, we propose a scheme to restrain the space charge forces by expanding the transverse size of the laser pulses to reduce the charge density and adopting a multicell gun to increase the beam energy. Thus, quasiequally spaced ultrashort microbunches with relatively high charges can be generated according to our studies. Postacceleration can be used to freeze the longitudinal phase space dynamics. The proposed scheme is in principle able to generate intense multi-color narrow-band THz radiation and offers a promising way towards the tunable intense narrow-band THz sources.