The talk will review recent achievement of technology development for SASE-FELs, such as the low emittance electron sources. The talk also gives some suggestion on "Background technology requirement for Single Pass FELs before or behind the "low emittance" story. Question is what do we need to prepare before starting the construction of a large scale machine?

Femtosecond optical pulse interacts with the electron beam in the two-period undulator and produces energy modulation within a slice of the electron bunch. Then the electron beam enters the first part of the X-ray undulator and produces SASE radiation with 100 MW-level power. Due to energy modulation the frequency is correlated to the longitudinal position, and the largest frequency offset corresponds to a single-spike pulse in the time domain which is confined to one half-oscillation period near the central peak electron energy. After the first undulator the electron beam is guided through a magnetic delay which we use to position the X-ray spike with the largest frequency offset at the "fresh" part of the electron bunch. After the chicane the electron beam and the radiation enter the second undulator which is resonant with the offset frequency where only a single (300 as duration) spike grows rapidly. The final part of the undulator is a tapered section allowing to achieve maximum output power 100-150 GW in 0.15 nm wavelength range.

The electron trajectories at the LEUTL, a SASE FEL facility at Argonne, were routinely corrected during the user run in order to deliver maximum radiation power to the user. Even though we knew from experience that SASE gain at the segmented undulators was dependent on the trajectory, the quantitative understanding of steering effects associated with the specific trajectory was lacking. Recently Tanaka et al. proposed an analytical model for the single-kick error (SKE) effect. Since LEUTL has eight segmented undulators, we performed the first measurement of SKE on the FEL gain. In the experiments we varied the corrector strength up to the critical angle, and the gain over the undulator was measured for each corrector setting. The results were compared with the analytical model and GENESIS simulations. We also measured the e-beam positions and SASE intensities over the undulators. The experimental data were analyzed and their results were reproduced by GENESIS simulation. The simulation condition, including the measured not-so-ideal trajectory, was used to predict performance enhancements that could be achieved by upgrading e-beam current, e-beam emittance, or trajectory control.