Stabilization system of a photoinjector drive laser.

In the Etude d'un LaSer Accordable linear accelerator, electron bunches consist of trains of picosecond pulses extracted from a photocathode by a drive laser system. The fluctuations of the mean intensity of pulse trains at the output of the laser system are around 3% rms. A feed-forward stabilization system that reduces these fluctuations to better than 0.7% rms for periods of 5 min is presented.