Cockcroft Institute, Warrington, Cheshire
The University of Liverpool, Liverpool
UNM, Albuquerque, New Mexico
SLAC, Menlo Park, California
Microbunching can cause an instability which degrades beam quality. This is a major concern for free electron lasers where very bright electron beams are required. A basic theoretical framework for understanding this instability is the 3D Vlasov-Maxwell system. However, the numerical integration of this system is computationally intensive. Investigations to date have used simplified analytical models or numerical solvers based on simple 1D models. We have developed an accurate and reliable 2D Vlasov-Maxwell solver which we believe improves existing codes. This solver has been successfully tested against the Zeuthen benchmark bunch compressors. Here we apply our self-consistent, parallel solver to study the microbunching instability in the first bunch compressor system of FERMI@Elettra.
