Attosecond shaping of high-current pulsed electron beams in a home-built 37-keV beamline

Abstract

Ultrashort electron pulses with a high average current provide a powerful means of enhancing time-resolved imaging and photon generation. In this study, we report the attosecond shaping of sub-relativistic electron beams using membranes in a newly developed apparatus that delivers a relatively high current (>2 electrons per pulse on a sample) with negligible space-charge effects. Optimizing the membrane arrangement minimizes the spread of electron-light delays to within a femtosecond over a wide range of incident angles. This enables the recording of attosecond streaking spectrograms, where net acceleration and deceleration, as well as monochromatization and energy broadening, are clearly observed. Through comparison with models, we estimate the durations of the bunched electrons to be 1.3 fs (FWHM) and 0.5 fs (RMS). Furthermore, we demonstrate the attosecond modulation of pulsed beams with a large energy spread originating from space charge effects. A modulation amplitude of 2 eV is shown to be sufficient to shape a beam with an initial spread of 15 eV (FWHM). These results represent a significant step toward the generation of an attosecond pulse containing one or more electrons.