THz Acceleration for Compact Electron and X-ray Sources

Prof. Franz Kärtner | DESY Hamburg

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The use of very high frequencies up to the THz region, specifically 100 - 500 GHz, enables operation of accelerators at higher field strength with lower energetic driver pulses. This opens up the possibility of compact low emittance electron sources and X-ray sources. In this contribution, we summarize the progress made towards that goal both in terms of acceleration and beam manipulation devices, laser technology to produce high energy single-cycle and multi-cycle THz waves as well as different approaches towards efficient THz generation. The high acceleration fields and field gradients possible in terahertz devices enables novel electron guns, electron bunch manipulations, bunch diagnostic and promise ultimately fully coherent X-ray production from compact sources. Latest experimental results in the implementation of electron and X-ray sources based on this technology will be discussed.

Franz Kärtner leads the Ultrafast Optics and X-rays Group at the Center for Free-Electron Laser Science at DESY and is Professor of Physics at Universität Hamburg. He received his Diploma and PhD-degrees in Electrical Engineering from Technische Universität München and his Venia Legendi in Experimental Physics from ETH-Zurich. He taught and carried out research at ETH-Zurich, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and Massachusetts Institute of Technology before coming to Hamburg. His research interests include classical and quantum noise, few-cycle and ultralow jitter femtosecond lasers and sub-cycle optical waveform synthesizers, precision timing distribution and integrated optics, compact electron and x-ray sources, terahertz generation and acceleration and attosecond science. He founded the company Cycle GmbH, active in femtosecond precision timing. He is a Fellow of OPTICA and IEEE and was honored with the 2022 IEEE Laser Instrumentation Award and the UNIPRENEURS Award in 2023. During 2024, he serves as Interim Director of Photon Science at DESY.

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