FEL2026 - 42nd International Free Electron Laser Conference

Operational experience and challenges of a CW X-ray FEL at SLAC

TUA02

25 Aug 2026, 09:50

20m

Contributed Oral Presentation Session 4: SASE FEL SASE FEL (Contributed)

Speaker

Christopher Zimmer (SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory)

Description

Driven by a continuous-wave superconducting linear accelerator, a high-repetition-rate x-ray FEL has been build at SLAC. After commissioning in 2022 and 2023, early user operation was started in 2024. By the end of 2025, the machine was operated with up to 93,000 Hz beam rate, supporting 3 soft x-ray user stations. We will report the beam and FEL performance, operation observations and challenges in this paper.

Funding Agency

This work was supported by the US Department of Energy, Office of Science, under contract no. DE-AC02-76SF005.