Generation of electron bunches at low repetition rates using a beat-frequency technique

Even at a continuous wave facility such as CEBAF at Jefferson Lab, an electron beam with long time intervals (tens of ns) between individual bunches can be useful, for example, to isolate sources of background via time of flight detection or to measure the energy of neutral particles that cannot be separated with a magnetic field. This paper describes a demonstrated method to quickly and easily deliver bunches with repetition rates of 20 to 100 MHz corresponding to time intervals between 50 and 10 ns (respectively). This is accomplished by changing the ON/OFF frequency of the photogun drive laser by a small amount (Δf/f<20%), resulting in a bunch frequency equal to the beat frequency between the radio frequencies of the drive laser and the photoinjector chopper system.