Design of an electro-optical sampling experiment at the AWA facility

The free space electro-optical (EO) sampling technique is a powerful tool for analyzing the longitudinal charge density of an ultrashort e-beam. In this paper, we present (i) experimental results for a laser-based mock-up of the EO experiment [1] and (ii) a design for a beam-based, single-shot, EO sampling experiment using the e-beam from the Argonne Wakefield Accelerator (AWA) RF photoinjector. For the mock-up, a tabletop terahertz experiment is conducted in the AWA laser room. The mock-up uses an IR beam incident on <110> ZnTe crystal to produce a THz pulse via optical rectification. Detection is based on the cross correlation between the THz field and the probe IR laser field in a second <110> ZnTe crystal.