Photocathodes are key elements in high-brightness electron sources and ubiquitous in the operation of large-scale accelerators. In this work, we propose the use of ultrafast laser nanostructuring techniques on copper photocathodes as a way to enhance the quantum efficiency of metallic photocathodes and enable their use in next-generation electron photoinjectors. When the surface is nanoengineered with patterns and particles much smaller than the optical wavelength, it can lead to the excitation of localized surface plasmons that produce hot electrons, ultimately contributing to the overall charge produced. To quantify the performance of laser nanopatterned photocathodes, we measured their quantum efficiency in a typical electron gun setup. Our experimental results suggest that plasmon-induced hot electrons lead to a significant increase in quantum efficiency, showing an overall charge enhancement factor of at least 4.5 and up to 25. We demonstrate laser nanopatterned plasmonic photocathodes outperform standard metallic photocathodes, and can be directly produced in-situ at the electron gun level in vacuum environments and without any disruptive intervention.
The study of the atomic spectrum via resonant laser excitation provides access to underlying effects caused by the nuclear structure, which is of special interest in short-lived radioisotopes produced at Isotope Separator On-Line (ISOL) facilities. Current implementations of resonant laser ionization techniques often limit the extraction of the nuclear observables due to the low spectral resolution of the pulsed laser systems deployed. Several high-resolution spectroscopy techniques demand spectral widths in the order of hundreds of MHz and below. A proven solution to reduce this linewidth is the pulsed amplification of a narrow-band continuous wave (cw) laser. This work presents the demonstration of a pulsed dye amplifier seeded by a commercially available cw Optical Parametric Oscillator (OPO). The performance of this system was compared with competing setups using a cw dye laser seed source as well as a frequency mixing technique using a combination of an injection-locked titanium:sapphire (Ti:Sa) and a Nd:YVO4 laser. Spectral bandwidths of the systems were measured using a high finesse Fabry-Perot Interferometer, resulting in comparable optical linewidths between 140 to 156 MHz at a wavelength of 328 nm for the different laser setups. Suitability for on-line experiments was validated by performing high-resolution spectroscopy of radioactive silver isotopes in the Collinear Resonance Ionization Spectroscopy (CRIS) experiment at the Isotope Separator On-Line Device (ISOLDE), at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). The quality of the hyperfine spectra was similar for the dye and the OPO seed and the deduced hyperfine splitting was in good agreement with literature, while the frequency mixing technique exhibited less precise results attributed to the frequency instabilities and mode-hops of the single-mode Nd:YVO4 laser.
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