Emittance Measurements of the Jefferson Lab Free Electron Laser using optical transition radiation

Charged particle accelerators, such as the ones that power Free Electron Lasers (FEL), require high quality (low emittance) beams for efficient operation. Accurate and reliable beam diagnostics are essential to monitoring beam parameters in order to maintain a high quality beam. Optical Transition Radiation Interferometry (OTRI) has shown potential to be a quality diagnostic that is especially useful for high brightness electron beams such as Jefferson Labs FEL energy recovery linac. The purpose of this project is to further develop OTRI beam diagnostic techniques. An optical system was designed to make beam size and divergence measurements as well as to prepare for experiments in optical phase space mapping. Beam size and beam divergence measurements were taken to calculate the emittance of the Jefferson Lab FEL. OTRI is also used to separate core and halo beam divergences in order to estimate core and halo emittance separately.