• Y. Hidaka, C.C. Kao, J.B. Murphy, S. Pjerov, B. Podobedov, H.J. Qian, S. Seletskiy, Y. Shen, X.J. Wang, X. Yang
  BNL, Upton, Long Island, New York

Ultrafast electron diffraction (UED) is a promising technique that allows us to observe a molecular structure transition on a time scale on the order of femtoseconds. The UED has several advantages over the competing technology, X-Ray Free Electron Laser (XFEL) in terms of its compactness, 6 orders of magnitude larger cross section, and less damaging ability to the samples being probed. Present state-of-the-art UED systems utilize subrelativistic electron bunches as the probing beam. With such low energy, however, the number of electrons in the bunch must be significantly decreased for a short bunch length (~100 fs) due to space charge effects. This limits the detection capability of such keV UED devices. To overcome this issue, a UED system using an MeV electron beam has been proposed, and designed at Source Development Laboratory (SDL) in National Synchrotron Light Source (NSLS) at Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL). A detailed performance analysis of this system using the particle tracking code, GPT, from the photoinjector cathode to the detector, will be presented, as well as the status of the commissioning of our UED system.