Ultrafast electron diffraction

Ultrafast Electron Diffraction (UED) is a pump-probe experimental method based on the combination of optical pump-probe spectroscopy and electron diffraction. UED provides information on the dynamical changes of the structure of materials. In the UED technique, a femtosecond (fs) laser optical pulse excites (pumps) a sample into an excited, usually non-equilibrium, state. The pump pulse may induce chemical, electronic or structural transitions. After a finite time interval, a fs electron pulse is incident upon the sample. The electron pulse undergoes diffraction as a result of interacting with the sample. The diffraction signal is, subsequently, detected by an electron counting instrument such as a CCD camera. Specifically, after the electron pulse diffracts from the sample, the scattered electrons will form a diffraction pattern (image) on a CCD camera. This pattern contains structural information about the sample. By adjusting the time difference between the arrival (at the sample) of the pump and probe beams, one can obtain a series of diffraction patterns as a function of the various time differences. The diffraction data series can be concatenated in order to produces a motion picture of the changes that occurred in the data. UED can provide a wealth of dynamics on charge carriers, atoms, and molecules.

Electron Pulse Production The electron pulses are produced by the process of photoemission in which a fs optical pulse is directed toward a photocathode. If the incident laser pulse has an appropriate energy, electrons will be ejected from the photocathode through a process known as photoemission.

Electron Pulse Compression Generally, two methods are used in order to compress electron pulses in order to overcome pulsewidth expansion due to Coulomb repulsion. Generating high-flux ultrashort electron beams has been relatively straightforward, but pulse duration below a picosecond proved extremely difficult due to space-charge effects. Space-charge interactions increase in severity with bunch charge and rapidly act to broaden the pulse duration, which has resulted in an apparently unavoidable trade-off between signal (bunch charge) and time-resolution in ultrafast electron diffraction (UED) experiments. Radio-frequency (RF)compression has emerged has an leading method of reducing the pulse expansion in UED experiments.