Six-dimensional measurements of trains of high brightness electron bunches

Trains of ultrashort electron pulses with THz repetition rate, so-called comblike beams, are assuming an ever growing interest in plasma-based acceleration. In particle-driven plasma wakefield acceleration (PWFA), a train of driver bunches with separation of the order of plasma wavelength, i.e., 300 μm, resonantly excites a plasma wake, which accelerates a trailing witness bunch, injected at the accelerating phase. Comblike beams have great potentialities in different fields of applications. In particular, radiation sources, such as free-electron lasers and THz radiation, take advantage from the possibility to tailor electron beams modulated both in time and energy, to customize emission bandwidth and temporal properties. In these scenarios, the manipulation of longitudinal phase space to investigate different bunch configurations, in terms of energy and time separation, is founded on the knowledge of the 6D phase space of each bunch in the train. In this paper we present the methods developed at the SPARC_LAB test facility in order to fulfill the requirements. Starting from conventional diagnostics, therefore applying well-known tools using more than one diagnostic at the same time, we have completely characterized not only the full 6D phase space of a comblike electron beam with THz repetition rate, but also each single bunch within the train. To our knowledge, this is the first time such a measurement has been performed. Experimental results for multibunch trains in different configurations, suitable for PWFA applications, will be shown and discussed.