• O. Mete, E. Chevallay, A.E. Dabrowski, S. Döbert, K. Elsener, V. Fedosseev, T. Lefèvre, M. Petrarca
  CERN, Geneva
• D. Egger, O. Mete
  EPFL, Lausanne
• R. Roux
  LAL, Orsay

Within the framework of the second Joint Research Activity PHIN of the European CARE program, a new photo injector for CTF3 drive beam has been designed and installed by collaboration between LAL, CCLRC and CERN. The laser driven rf photo injectors are recent candidates for high-brightness, low-emittance electron sources. One of the main beam dynamics issues for a high brightness electron source is the optimization of beam envelope behavior in the presence of the space charge force in order to get low emittance. Beam based measurements have been made during the commissioning runs of the PHIN 2008 and 2009 including measurements of the emittance, using multi-slits technique. In this work the photo injector will be described and the first beam measurement results will be presented and compared with the PARMELA simulations.