High Brightness Photoelectron Beamlines for Femtosecond Science

Particle accelerators can be used as cameras, creating bunches of electrons or X-ray pulses which can produce images of objects smaller than what can be resolved with visible light. Denser and colder electron bunches create higher resolution images both in space and time. The development of high brightness photocathodes is a driving force in the improvement of accelerators used for time resolved science. In this thesis, a fundamental limit in the creation cold dense electron beams from photocathodes is presented and simulated. Additionally, methods for preserving the quality of cold dense electron beams in transport are simulated and experimentally demonstrated in an operating ultrafast electron diffraction beamline.