Speaker
Description
Free-electron lasers (FELs) send an accelerated electron beam through a magnetic undulator to provide a source of continuously tunable, short (10s of fs), high-peak power (GW-scale) radiation. FELs have found many applications, particularly in the infrared, extreme ultraviolet (EUV) and X-ray regimes. However, current EUV and X-ray FELs are large (100s of m) and expensive facilities, limiting the accessibility of these sources. In this work, we present FEL simulations driven by a compact accelerator combining high-gradient short pulse two-beam wakefield accelerators [1] and short-period superconducting undulators [2]. An FEL demo based on a GeV-scale accelerator is discussed as a driver for a water-window ( 2.3-4.4 nm) FEL with a ≈ 50 m length. Such a proof-of-principle integrated facility would serve the dual purpose of supporting user-based research in the water-window regime, and providing a proving ground for these new technologies to later be applied to shorter wavelength FELs. Here, we present early design and simulation efforts with a focus on FEL-process modeling.
Funding Agency
Funded by Laboratory Directed Research and Development (LDRD) at Argonne National Laboratory, provided by the Director, Office of Science, of the U.S. DOE under Contract No. DE-AC02-06CH11357.
Footnotes
[1]W. H. Tan et al., “Demonstration of sub-GV/m accelerating field in a photoemission electron gun powered by nanosecond x-band radio-frequency pulses,” Phys. Rev. Accel. Beams, vol. 25, no. 8, p. 083402, Aug. 2022, doi: 10.1103/PhysRevAccelBeams.25.083402.
[2]I. Kesgin et al., “Quench Behavior of 18-mm-Period, 1.1-m-Long Nb3Sn Undulator Magnets,” IEEE Transactions on Applied Superconductivity, vol. 34, no. 5, pp. 1–10, Aug. 2024, doi: 10.1109/TASC.2024.3350606.
