The Physics and Applications of High Brightness Beams: Working Group A Summary on High Brightness Beam Production

Working group A was devoted to high brightness beam production and characterization. The presentations and discussions could be categorized as cathode physics, new photoinjector designs, computational modeling of high brightness beams, and new experimental methods and results. Several novel injector and cathode designs were presented. However, a standard 1.5 cell rf photoinjector is still the most common source for high brightness beams. New experimental results and techniques were presented and thoroughly discussed. The brightest beam produced in a rf photoinjector published at the time of the workshop is approximately 2 10{sup 14} A/(m-rad){sup 2} at Sumitomo Heavy Industries in Japan with 1 nC of charge, a 9 ps FWHM long laser pulse and a normalized transverse emittance of 1.2 pm. The emittance was achieved by utilizing a temporally flat laser pulse which decreased the emittance by an estimated factor of 2 from the beam produced with a Gaussian pulse shape with an identical pulse length.