Femtosecond Transversal Deflection of Electron Beams with the Help of Laser Beams and Its Possible Applications

It is shown that the interaction of an electron beam with polarized electromagnetic wave of laser photons propagating in the same direction in a short interaction region results in significant transversal deflection of the electrons which can be used for production of femtosecond electron and synchrotron radiation beams, for chopping the electron beams and construction of laser oscilloscopes measuring femtosecond processes. PACS numbers: 41.75.Jv, 42.60.Jf As it is well known (see [1] and references therein) it is difficult to accelerate the charged particles by the periodically varying electromagnetic field of laser photon beams, especially, in vacuum, because the fields are perpendicular to the direction of propagation of photons. Despite the fact that there are very strong fields of laser beams with intensity up toW ≃ 10W/cm and electric field up to E ≃ 2.10V/cm and optimistic acceleration rates theoretically predicted for various advanced methods of particle acceleration, the achieved record acceleration rates are less than ∼ 10eV/cm at very short distances, and the progress in this field is very slow. On the other hand there is a growing interest to the production and study of particle and photon bunches with ultrashort time duration connected with the advance of new acceleration methods, microbunching of particle beams, various radiation mechanism, etc. The latest achievements [2-4] of obtaining femtosecond pulses of synchrotron radiation with spectral distribution from infrared to hard X-ray regions using femtosecond laser pulses [5] open a possibility to study atomic, solid state, chemical and biological processes in a new fundamental time scale of ∼ 100 fs of the order of vibrational period of molecules. e-mail: [email protected]