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The infrared free-electron laser offers the advantage of a potential large tunability since the FEL gain itself remains subtantially high throughout the infrared spectral range, provided that the electron beam quality remains sufficient at low energy. Moreover, the reflectivity of metal mirrors used in the optical cavity remains close to unity from the near infrared up to the microwave range. The main limitation comes from the diffraction of the optical beam due to the finite size of the vacuum chamber of the undulator and other optical cavity elements. The undulator magnetic gap, and thus magnetic chamber inner heigth, cannot be made arbitrarily large since one needs a K parameter sufficiently large to produce a large wavength tunability (typically K > 2). The diffraction losses can however be further reduced by using an elliptical vacuum chamber inside the undulator and elliptical, instead of spherical, mirrors. Then the optical beam is partially guided inside the chamber. Working in this regime at CLIO, we have obtained an FEL tunable from 3 to 120 μm by operating the accelerator between 50 and 14 MeV. This is the largest spectral range ever obtained with a single optical cavity. We plan to use larger mirrors to further reduce the diffraction produced at the edges of the undulator chambers in order to increase the maximum wavelength to approximately 200 μm
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