Interaction of relativistic electrons with ultrashort laser pulses: generation of femtosecond X-rays and microprobing of electron beams

The interaction of relativistic electrons with terawatt femtosecond laser pulses is reviewed with emphasis on how the scattering process can be used as a source of ultrashort X-ray pulses and as a time-resolved diagnostic for measuring transverse and longitudinal phase space distributions of an electron beam with microns spatial and subpicosecond temporal resolution. Recent experimental results are presented in which 90/spl deg/ Thomson scattering was utilized to generate 300 fs duration pulses of X-rays with peak energy of 30 keV. It is shown that, through analysis of the scattered X-ray beam properties, transverse and longitudinal distributions of the electron beam can be obtained.