RECENT PROGRESS OF MeV ULTRAFAST ELECTRON

Recent years have witnessed rapid advances of MeV ultrafast electron diffraction (UED), in which high quality, ultrashort, MeV electron pulses from a photocathode RF gun are employed as probes for ultrafast structural dynamics. We’ve built a prototype MeV UED system at the Accelerator Laboratory of Tsinghua University, optimized the the electron pulse parameters as well as hardware performances, and achieved high quality single-shot diffraction patterns. Moreover, MeV UED can be operated in a socalled ’continuously time-resolved (CTR)’ mode, in which an RF deflecting cavity streaks the electron pulse thus each diffraction pattern constitutes an ’atomic movie’. We report our experimental progress on MeV UED in this paper.