23–28 Aug 2026
America/Los_Angeles timezone

AI-assisted FEL tuning for attosecond pulse generation

MOP02
24 Aug 2026, 16:00
2h
Poster Presentation Session 3: FEL theory and Machine Learning Monday Poster Session

Speaker

Aaron Reed (SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory)

Description

At LCLS, attosecond xFEL pulses (“XLEAP” mode) allow users to probe electronic process on their natural timescale.* However, XLEAP is much more sensitive than conventional SASE operation to drifts and jitter in the RF phases, laser timing, bunch charge, and beam orbit. As a result, XLEAP setup and pulse energy optimization is highly variable and difficult to replicate even minute-to-minute, leading to delays in user experiments and unpredictable time commitments for operators.

In this work, we explore archival data to identify sources of variation driving XLEAP performance. This allows us to frame XLEAP as an optimization problem in high-dimensional control space with conflicting objectives, few diagnostics, and time dependence on scales from the sampling rate to minutes and hours. We consider how machine learning techniques can be used to effectively tune the machine in this complicated landscape.

Funding Agency

Supported by the Basic Energy Sciences Accelerator and Detector Research program under Contract No. DE-AC02-76SF00515, and the Office of Basic Energy Science Accelerator and Detector Research Program.

Footnotes

*Duris, J., Li, S., Driver, T. et al. Tunable isolated attosecond X-ray pulses with gigawatt peak power from a free-electron laser. Nat. Photonics 14, 30–36 (2020).

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Author

Aaron Reed (SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory)

Co-authors

David Cesar (SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory) Nick Sudar (SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory) Auralee Edelen (SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory) Agostino Marinelli (SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory)

Presentation materials

There are no materials yet.