Coherence Properties of Individual Femtosecond Pulses of an X-ray Free-Electron Laser

Measurements of the spatial and temporal coherence of single, femtosecond x-ray pulses generated by the first hard x-ray free-electron laser, the Linac Coherent Light Source, are presented. Single-shot measurements were performed at 780 eV x-ray photon energy using apertures containing double pinhol...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Physical review letters 2012-06, Vol.107 (14)
Main Authors: Vartanyants, I.A., /DESY /Moscow Phys. Eng. Inst, Singer, A., Mancuso, A.P., Yefanov, O.M., /DESY, Sakdinawat, A., Liu, Y., Bang, E., /UC, Berkeley, Williams, G.J., /SLAC, Cadenazzi, G., Abbey, B., /Melbourne U., Sinn, H., /European XFEL, Hamburg, Attwood, D., Nugent, K.A., Weckert, E., Wang, T., Zhu, D., Wu, B., Graves, C., Scherz, A., Turner, J.J., Schlotter, W.F., /SLAC /LERMA, Ivry /Zurich, ETH /LBL, Berkeley /ANL, APS /Argonne /SLAC /LLNL, Livermore /Latrobe U. /SLAC /SLAC /European XFEL, Hamburg /SLAC /Hamburg U.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
APERTURES
COHERENCE LENGTH
DIFFRACTION
FREE ELECTRON LASERS
Instrumentation,INST, PHYS
LIGHT SOURCES
LINEAR ACCELERATORS
PARTICLE ACCELERATORS
PHOTONS
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Summary:Measurements of the spatial and temporal coherence of single, femtosecond x-ray pulses generated by the first hard x-ray free-electron laser, the Linac Coherent Light Source, are presented. Single-shot measurements were performed at 780 eV x-ray photon energy using apertures containing double pinholes in 'diffract-and-destroy' mode. We determined a coherence length of 17 {micro}m in the vertical direction, which is approximately the size of the focused Linac Coherent Light Source beam in the same direction. The analysis of the diffraction patterns produced by the pinholes with the largest separation yields an estimate of the temporal coherence time of 0.55 fs. We find that the total degree of transverse coherence is 56% and that the x-ray pulses are adequately described by two transverse coherent modes in each direction. This leads us to the conclusion that 78% of the total power is contained in the dominant mode.
ISSN:0031-9007
1079-7114