Increasing the peak brightness is beneficial to various applications of the Thomson scattering X-ray source. A higher peak brightness of the scattered X-ray pulse demands a shorter scattering electron beam realized by beam compression in the electron beam-line. In this article, we study the possibility of compressing the electron beam in a typical S-band normal conducting photo-injector via ballistic bunching, through just adding a short RF linac section right behind the RF gun, so as to improve the peak brightness of the scattered x-ray pulse. Numerical optimization by ASTRA demonstrates that the peak current can increase from 50 A to 300 A for a 500 pC, 10 ps FWHM electron pulse, while normalized transverse RMS emittance and RMS energy spread increases very little. Correspondingly, the peak brightness of the Thomson scattering X-ray source is estimated to increase about three times.
Megaelectronvolt ultrafast electron diffraction（UED） is a promising detection tool for ultrafast processes.The quality of diffraction image is determined by the transverse evolution of the probe bunch. In this paper, we study the contributing terms of the emittance and space charge effects to the bunch evolution in the MeV UED scheme, employing a mean-field model with an ellipsoidal distribution as well as particle tracking simulation. The small transverse dimension of the drive laser is found to be critical to improve the reciprocal resolution, exploiting both smaller emittance and larger transverse bunch size before the solenoid. The degradation of the reciprocal spatial resolution caused by the space charge effects should be carefully controlled.
