Recirculating linac free-electron laser driver

Abstract

This paper describes the design of a recirculating linac as a driver for the suite of seeded free-electron lasers (FELs) proposed in the UK New Light Source (NLS) project. The choice of superconducting technology for NLS is required in order to deliver bunches at high repetition rates up to 1 MHz. This raises the question of whether a shorter linac in recirculating mode can deliver the beam quality required for seeded FELs. To design such a facility, careful layout choices and optimizations must be made to ensure emittance growth is minimized. Effects leading to emittance dilution include chromatic transport terms, incoherent and coherent synchrotron radiation. The design outlined here is based on a modular philosophy to separate beam injection and extraction from a three stage compression scheme. The design uses many novel design concepts and optimizations to deliver the necessary high peak currents while preserving beam quality for seeded FELs. Start-to-end simulations including the FELs show that the necessary pulse coherence and output power can be provided from the beam thus generated. © 2011 American Physical Society.