DELTA, Dortmund, Germany
In contrast to free-electron lasers (FELs), ring-based light sources are limited in intensity by incoherent emission and in pulse duration by the bunch length. However, FEL seeding schemes can be adopted to generate intense and ultrashort radiation pulses in storage rings by creating laser-induced microbunches within a short slice of the electron bunch. Microbunching gives rise to coherent emission at harmonics of the seed wavelength. In addition, terahertz (THz) radiation is coherently emitted over many turns. At DELTA, a storage ring operated by the TU Dortmund University, coherent harmonic generation (CHG) with single and double 40-fs pulses is routinely performed at seed wavelengths of 800 and 400 nm. Seeding with intensity-modulated pulses to generate tunable narrowband THz radiation is also studied. As a preparation for echo-enabled harmonic generation (EEHG), simultaneous seeding with 800/400-nm pulses in two undulators has been demonstrated. The DELTA storage ring is an excellent testbed to study many aspects of laser seeding and related diagnostics. In addition to short-pulse generation, steady-state microbunching at ring-based light sources will be discussed in the paper.
