Measurement of femtosecond electron bunches

Bunch lengths as short as 84 fs (rms) have been measured at Jefferson Lab using a zero-phasing RF technique. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first accurate bunch length measurement in this regime. In this letter, an analytical approach for computing the longitudinal distribution function and bunch length is described for arbitrary longitudinal and transverse distributions. The measurement results are presented, which are in excellent agreement with numerical simulations.