Interaction of a relativistic electron beam with radiation in the THz frequency range

The ability to generate a train of microbunches that are only typically tens of femtosecond wide and are separated by a picosecond is a topic of contemporary interest in the field of free electron lasers and plasma based accelerators. Moreover the usefulness of the high gradients present in plasma accelerators will depend on the ability to obtain mono-energetic relativistic electrons. This means that in addition to being prebunched on a scale shorter than the plasma wavelength the externally injected electron beam must be phase-locked to the accelerating plasma wave structure. In this thesis we investigate two techniques, Free Electron Laser interaction (FEL) and the Inverse Free Electron Laser interaction (IFEL), by which a medium energy electron beam can be prebunched into a series of microbunches with the same periodicity as a plasma wave and is phase locked to it.;Using full-scale, 3-D simulations we show in this thesis that when a relativistic electron beam and an electromagnetic wave propagate collinearly through a magnetic undulator, FEL and IFEL interactions have the capability to form electron microbunches with periodicity 300-100 mum (1-3 THz range), which contain 50% of electrons within a small fraction of the ponderomotive buckets. Such a bunched beam is suitable for injection into plasma densities in the range 1016-1017 cm-3, respectively. Microbunching using the FEL mechanism requires a narrowband THz radiation source to act as a seed whereas the IFEL mechanism requires, in addition, such a source to be high power. In this thesis the generation of THz radiation in the Neptune Laboratory by mixing of two CO2 laser lines in a non-collinearly phase matched GaAs at room temperature is described A high-power THz pulse with up to 2 MW of peak power in a 250 ps pulse was generated using a TW class CO2 laser pulse. Such high power THz radiation is needed for the IFEL approach to microbunching. We also produced a high repetition rate THz source tunable in the 0.5-3 THz range with a maximum of ∼2 kW of peak power in a 200 ns pulse suitable as a seed for an FEL microbuncher. These sources represent the most powerful and the most energetic narrowband THz sources currently reported using nonlinear optical technique to our knowledge.;During the FEL microbunching process, the wiggling electrons in the undulator also emit radiation coherently at the resonant frequency; as a result, the THz FEL microbuncher can double as a single pass THz amplifier tunable in the 0.5-3 THz range. It is shown that when seeded with a ∼1 kW THz pulse and driven by an electron beam with a peak current of 60A, a 2 m-long undulator can amplify the radiation power to ∼20MW. The frequency range can be further expanded to up to 9 THz via the High Gain Harmonic Generation (HGHG) FEL configuration. The results of these simulations are used as a guide in designing a single-pass THz FEL microbuncher/amplifier which is currently under construction.;In order to study THz microbunching and amplification, several original techniques and diagnostics were also developed. Guiding a THz pulse through a hollow waveguide, filtering a short THz pulse using a Fabry-Perot interferometer and measuring the frequency components using a diffraction grating spectrometer were demonstrated.