• D. Xiang, G.V. Stupakov
  SLAC, Menlo Park, California
• W.M. Fawley
  LBNL, Berkeley, California

Funding: This work was supported by U.S. DOE contracts DE-AC03-76SF00515 and under the auspices of the Office of Science, U.S. DOE under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231.

Recently Stupakov* has suggested a scheme entitled echo-enabled harmonic generation (EEHG) for producing short wavelength FEL radiation that allows far higher harmonic numbers to be accessed as compared with the normal limit arising from incoherent energy spread. We have studied the feasibility of a single EEHG stage to generate coherent radiation in the "water window" (2- 4 nm wavelength) directly from a UV seed laser at ~200-nm wavelength. By adjusting the temporal overlap region of the two lasers producing energy modulation in the EEHG scheme, we find it may be possible to vary the duration of the output coherent soft x-ray pulse. We present time-dependent simulation results which explore these ideas and also examine the sensitivity of the scheme to various input electron beam parameters.

*G. Stupakov, Preprint SLAC-PUB-13445

• D. Xiang, G.V. Stupakov
  SLAC, Menlo Park, California

Funding: This work was supported by US DOE contracts DE-AC03-76SF00515

The echo-enabled harmonic generation free electron laser (EEHG FEL) holds great promise in generation of coherent soft x-ray directly from a UV seed laser within one stage. The density modulation in the harmonic generation process is affected by the smearing effect caused by the fluctuations of energy and current along the beam, as well as the field error of the dispersive elements. In this paper we study the tolerance of the EEHG FEL on beam quality and field quality.

• D. Xiang, J. Wu
  SLAC, Menlo Park, California

Microbunching instability is one of the most challenging threats to FEL performances. The most effective way to suppress microbunching instability is to increase the relative slice energy spread of the beam. In this paper we show that the velocity bunching inherently mitigates the microbunching instability. PARMELA simulation indicates that the initial current modulations are suppressed in velocity bunching process, which may be attributed to the strong Landau damping from the relatively large relative slice energy spread.

• J. Wu, R. Akre, A. Brachmann, P. Chu, F.-J. Decker, Y.T. Ding, D. Dowell, S.A. Edstrom, P. Emma, D. Fairley, J.C. Frisch, A. Gilevich, G.R. Hays, P. Hering, Z. Huang, R.H. Iverson, H. Loos, A. Miahnahri, H.-D. Nuhn, D.F. Ratner, J.L. Turner, J.J. Welch, W.E. White, D. Xiang
  SLAC, Menlo Park, California
• E. Meier
  ASCo, Clayton, Victoria

Funding: Work supported by Department of Energy contract DE-AC02-76SF00515. This work was performed in support of the LCLS project at SLAC

The Linac Coherent Light Source is an x-ray Free-Electron Laser (FEL) project being commissioned at SLAC. The very bright electron beam required for the FEL is subjected to various sources of jitter along the accelerator. The peak current, centroid energy, and trajectory of the electron bunch are controlled precisely at the highest repetition rate possible with feedback systems. We report commissioning experience for these systems. In particular, there is high frequency content in the electron bunch current spectrum, and we report its impact on the systems. Due to the coupling of the betatron motion and the dispersion component of the electron trajectory, a fast in-line model* is incorporated. For the longitudinal feedback, we report the performance of two different configurations: one with RF system as direct actuators, which are nonlinear, and the other with artificially formed linear energy and energy-chirp actuators. Since the electron bunch is compressed to a final peak current of 2 to 3 kA, coherent synchrotron radiation and other wakefields are included for precise control of the electron bunch parameters. Machine performance is compared to start-to-end simulations.

*P. Chu et al., these PAC09 proceedings