Ultrafast beam research at the PEGASUS laboratory

The PEGASUS laboratory at the UCLA Physics Department has been recently commissioned as a new advanced photoinjector facility for ultrafast beam research. With a newly installed state-of-the-art Ti:Sa laser driver capable of delivering sub 100 fs UV pulses onto the cathode, the laboratory capabilities have been greatly expanded. The beam charge is low (10 pC) to avoid excessive pulse lengthening. Nevertheless various applications could greatly benefit by this novel regime of operation of an rf photoinjector. We discuss the measurements performed to characterize the system with particular attention to the ones that are peculiar of a low charge sub-ps beam.