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Interactions between short laser pulses and electron bunches determine a wide range of accelerator applications. Finding spatiotemporal overlap between few-micron-sized optical and electron beams is critical, yet there are few routine diagnostics for this purpose. We present a method for achieving spatiotemporal overlap between a picosecond laser pulse and a relativistic sub-ps electron bunch. The method uses the transient change in optical transmission of a Ce:YAG screen upon irradiation with a short electron bunch to co-time the electron and laser beams. We demonstrate and quantify the performance of this method using an inverse Compton source comprised of a 30 MeV electron beam from an X-band linac focused to a 10 μm spot, overlapped with a joule-class picosecond Yb:YAG laser system. This method is applicable to electron beams with few-microjoule bunch energies and uses standard scintillator screens common in electron accelerators. 

While industrial-grade Yb-based amplifiers have become very prevalent, their limited gain bandwidth has created a large demand for robust spectral broadening techniques that allow for few-cycle pulse compression. In this work, we perform a comparative study between several atomic and molecular gases as media for spectral broadening in a hollow-core fiber geometry. Exploiting nonlinearities such as self-phase modulation, self-steepening, and stimulated Raman scattering, we explore the extent of spectral broadening and its dependence on gas pressure, the critical power for self-focusing, and the optimal regime for few-cycle pulse compression. Using a 3-mJ, 200-fs input laser pulses, we achieve 17 fs, few-cycle pulses with 80% fiber energy transmission efficiency. The optimal parameters can be scaled for higher or lower input pulse energies with appropriate gas parameters and fiber geometry. 

Using hexagonal boron nitride (hBN) as a substrate for graphene has shown faster carrier cooling which makes it ideal for high‐power graphene‐based devices. However, the effect of using boron‐isotope‐enriched hBN has not been explored. Herein, femtosecond pump‐probe spectroscopy is utilized to measure and compare the time dynamics of photo‐excited carriers in graphene‐hBN heterostructures for hBN with the natural distribution of boron isotopes (20%¹⁰B and 80%¹¹B) and hBN enriched to 100%¹⁰B and¹¹B. The carriers cool down faster for systems with isotopically pure hBN substrates by a factor of ≈1.7 times. This difference in relaxation times arises from the interfacial coupling between carriers in graphene and the hBN phonon modes. The results show that the boron isotopic purity of the hBN substrate can help to reduce the hot phonon bottleneck that limits the cooling in graphene devices.