Phase space tomography of relativistic electron beams

The performance of an FEL depends on the characteristics of the electron beam used to drive it. Heretofore it was not possible to measure the details of the transverse phase space distributions of high-energy electron beams with the precision required to predict FEL performance. Standard techniques for measuring the transverse phase space of relativistic electron beams treat the phase space distributions as ellipses and only measure the sigma matrices that define the ellipses. These techniques give no information about the detailed structure of the phase space distributions. We have developed a new technique to measure transverse phase space that combines quadrupole-scanning techniques with tomographic image reconstruction to measure the actual phase space distributions while making no a priori assumptions about the distributions. This process is capable of reconstructing phase space distributions that are not elliptical. Both computer simulations and experiments verify that phase space tomography makes the detailed measurement of the phase space distributions possible at high energies. Detailed reconstructions of the phase space distribution of a 44 MeV electron beam from the Mark III FEL are presented.