Shot-to-shot acquisition ultrafast electron diffraction

Abstract

We demonstrate a novel shot-to-shot acquisition method for optical pump - keV electron energy probe in ultrafast scattering experiments. We integrate a phase-locked acquisition scheme at a repetition rate of 20kHz in a conventional ultrafast electron diffraction (UED) setup. We proceed to a full characterization of the noise level in different configurations and for realistic scenarios. The shot-to-shot acquisition improves the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) by one order of magnitude and can be readily implemented in other high-repetition rate electron diffraction and spectroscopy setups.