Jitter sensitivity in photoinjectors

Photoinjectors are becoming the electron source of choice for high brightness, high current applications such as very-short wavelength free-electron lasers and electron linear colliders. In both of these applications the electron beam will be bunched to a multi-kiloampere current from its initial value of a few hundred amperes. The performance of such aggressive bunchers is very sensitive to the correlations in the longitudinal phase space. One of the major performance-determining factors is the timing of the injection of the electrons in the gun relative to the rf field. Of particular concern is the jitter of the drive-laser timing and amplitude, We develop a model of the system and use it to study the implications for photoinjector design