Coulomb-driven relativistic electron beam compression

Coulomb interaction between charged particles is a well-known phenomenon in many areas of researches. In general the Coulomb repulsion force broadens the pulse width of an electron bunch and limits the temporal resolution of many scientific facilities such as ultrafast electron diffraction and x-ray free-electron lasers. Here we demonstrate a scheme that actually makes use of Coulomb force to compress a relativistic electron beam. Furthermore, we show that the Coulomb-driven bunch compression process does not introduce additional timing jitter, which is in sharp contrast to the conventional radio-frequency buncher technique. Our work not only leads to enhanced temporal resolution in electron beam based ultrafast instruments that may provide new opportunities in probing material systems far from equilibrium, but also opens a promising direction for advanced beam manipulation through self-field interactions.