Laser Printing of Electron Bunches
A typical accelerator is like an assembly line where electrons are the workpieces. To get the desired X-ray pulse, the workpiece is fine-tuned after it's already on the line: squeezed, filtered, corrected. In the new work, engineers decided to take a different approach — shaping the workpiece before it even hits the conveyor.
At LCLS-II, electrons are knocked out of a metal by a short laser pulse.