Diamond, Oxfordshire
DESY, Hamburg
Linac based Free Electron Lasers require very high quality and stable electron beams both for the lasing process, and for use of the FEL beams in experiments. Various kinds of jitter in the injector may sensitively affect the FEL operation. In this paper, we study the jitter sources in the FEL injector and simulate how much they impact on the beam dynamics. Then, we discuss the required jitter tolerances to maintain good machine performance. Measurements have been carried out at the FLASH Free Electron Laser at DESY and beam dynamics simulations are applied to the UK's New Light Source facility.
Diamond, Oxfordshire
STFC/DL/ASTeC, Daresbury, Warrington, Cheshire
LBNL, Berkeley, California
The New Light Source (NLS) project was launched in April 2008 by the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) to consider the scientific case and develop a conceptual design for a possible next generation light source based on a combination of advanced conventional laser and free-electron laser sources. In this paper we present the results of the optimisation of a single pass superconducting LINAC as a driver for the the NLS FELs. The optimisation process requires the analysis of complicated electron beam dynamics in the presence of CSR, wakefields and space charge and has specifically taken into account the requirements for FEL operation in a seeded harmonic cascade scheme.
Diamond, Oxfordshire
We discuss the possible operation of the UK New Light Source in the single spike regime with photon energies ranging from 50 eV to 1 keV. The optimisation process of the beam dynamics in the single spike regime is outlined and we present the results of full start-to-end simulations to show that few-fs to sub-fs pulses can be obtained, depending on the photon energy, with interesting power level. The analysis of the jitter of the SASE output characteristic is also reported.