Spatio - temporal coherence of free electron laser pulses in the soft x-ray regime

The temporal coherence properties of soft x-ray free electron laser pulses at FLASH are measured at 23.9 nm by interfering two time-delayed partial beams directly on a CCD camera. The partial beams are obtained by wave front beam splitting in an autocorrelator operating at photon energies from hv = 30 to 200 eV. At zero delay a visibility of (0.63 +/- 0.04) is measured. The delay of one partial beam reveals a coherence time of 6 fs at 23.9 nm. The visibility further displays a non-monotonic decay, which can be rationalized by the presence of multiple pulse structure. (C) 2008 Optical Society of America