Femtosecond visualization of laser-induced optical relativistic electron microbunches

It has long been known that lasers can interact with relativistic electrons in magnetic undulators to imprint sinusoidal modulations that can be used to slice electrons into microbunches equally separated at the laser wavelength. Here we report on the first direct measurement of laser-induced microbunching of a relativistic electron beam with femtosecond resolution in the time domain. Using a modified zero-phasing technique to map the electron beam's temporal structures into the energy space, we show that this method can be used to directly quantify the time and spectral content of coherent current modulations imprinted on the beam for harmonic and multicolor lasing applications in accelerator-based light sources.