• B. Faatz, N. Baboi, V. Balandin, W. Decking, S. Düsterer, J. Feldhaus, N. Golubeva, T. Laarmann, T. Limberg, D. Nölle, E. Plönjes, H. Schlarb, S. Schreiber, F. Tavella, K.I. Tiedtke, R. Treusch
  DESY, Hamburg
• J. Bahrdt, R. Follath, M. Gensch, K. Holldack, A. Meseck, R. Mitzner
  Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin für Materialien und Energie GmbH, Elektronen-Speicherring BESSY II, Berlin
• M. Drescher, V. Miltchev, J. Roßbach
  Uni HH, Hamburg

FLASH has been a user fa­cil­i­ty since 2005, de­liv­er­ing ra­di­a­tion in the wave­length range be­tween 7 and 47 nm using the SASE prin­ci­ple. In order to in­crease user beam time and im­prove the ra­di­a­tion prop­er­ties de­liv­ered to users, a major ex­ten­sion of the user fa­cil­i­ty called FLASH II has been pro­posed by DESY in col­lab­o­ra­tion with the HZB, which is a seed­ed FEL over the pa­ram­e­ter range of FLASH. As log­i­cal con­tin­u­a­tion, the HHG de­vel­op­ment pro­gram start­ed with sFLASH, will re­sult in di­rect seed­ing. Be­cause in the fore­see­able fu­ture there will prob­a­bly not be HHG seed lasers avail­able at high rep­e­ti­tion rates down to wave­lengths of 4 nm, a cas­cad­ed HGHG scheme will be used to pro­duce short wave­lengths. After a first de­sign re­port, the pro­ject now en­ters its prepa­ra­tion phase until the de­ci­sion for fund­ing will be taken. Dur­ing this time, the FLASH beam pa­ram­e­ters after the pre­sent up­grade 2009/2010 will be char­ac­ter­ized and the pre­sent de­sign will be re-eval­u­at­ed and ad­just­ed. In ad­di­tion, com­plete start-to-end sim­u­la­tions will com­plete the sim­u­la­tions which have been per­formed so far, in­clud­ing a com­plete de­sign of the ex­trac­tion area.