DESY, Hamburg
Uni HH, Hamburg
The free-electron laser user facility FLASH at DESY, Germany has been upgraded. The upgrade started in autumn 2009 after almost 2 years of a very successful second user period. The beam energy is increased to 1.2 GeV by installing a 7th superconducting accelerating module. The new module is a prototype for the European XFEL. Among many other upgrades, 3rd harmonic superconducting RF cavities are installed in the injector. The main purpose is to flatten and - to a certain extend - to shape the longitudinal electron beam phase space improving the dynamics behavior of the beam. The seeding experiment sFLASH is being commissioned, an important step forward to establish seeded FEL radiation for user experiments. After the ongoing commissioning, the 3rd user period will start this summer. In many aspects FLASH will be an FEL with a new quality of performance: a wavelength approaching the carbon edge and the water window, tunable pulse width, and with thousands of pulses per second. This report summarizes the recently finished upgrade of FLASH and reports on the results of the ongoing commissioning and the expected performance as a free electron laser user facility.
DESY, Hamburg
The free-electron laser facility FLASH at DESY, Germany finished its second user period scheduled from November 2007 to August 2009. More than 300 days have been devoted for user operation, a large part of beamtime has been allocated for machine studies for further developments, including beamtime for XFEL and ILC R&D. FLASH provides trains of fully coherent 10 to 50 femtosecond long laser pulses in the wavelength range from 40 nm to 6.8 nm. The SASE radiation contains also higher harmonics; several experiments have successfully used the third and fifth harmonics. The smallest wavelength used was 1.59 nm. We will give a summary of the experience from two years of user operation at FLASH.
Uni HH, Hamburg
DESY, Hamburg
PSI, Villigen
DELTA, Dortmund
Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin für Materialien und Energie GmbH, Elektronen-Speicherring BESSY II, Berlin
Recently, the free-electron laser in Hamburg (FLASH) at DESY has been upgraded considerably. Besides increasing the maximum energy to about 1.2 GeV and installation of a third harmonic rf cavity linearizing the longitudinal phase space distribution of the electron bunch, an FEL seeding experiment at wavelengths of about 35 nm has been installed. The goal is to establish direct FEL seeding employing coherent VUV pulses produced from a powerful drive laser by high-harmonic generation (HHG) in a gas cell. The project, called sFLASH, includes generation of the required HHG pulses, transporting it to the undulator entrance of a newly installed FEL-amplifier, controlling spatial, temporal and energy overlap with the electron bunches and setting up a pump-probe pilot experiment. Sophisticated diagnostics is installed to characterize both HHG and seeded FEL pulses, both in time and frequency domain. Compared to SASE-FEL pulses, almost perfect longitudinal coherence and improved synchronization possibilities for the user experiments are expected. In this paper the status of the experiment is presented.