Calculation of RF-induced Temporal Jitter in Ultrafast Electron Diffraction

A significant contribution to the temporal resolution of an ultrafast electron diffraction (UED) instrument is arrival time jitter caused by amplitude and phase variation of radio frequency (RF) cavities. In this paper, we present a semi-analytical approach for calculating RF-induced temporal jitter from klystron and RF cavity parameters. Our approach allows fast estimation of temporal jitter for MeV-UED beamlines and can serve as a virtual timing tool when shot-to-shot measurements of RF amplitude and phase jitters are available. A simulation study for the SLAC MeV-UED instrument is presented and the temporal resolution for several beamline configurations are compared.