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Plasma accelerators (Esary et al 2009 Rev. Mod. Phys.81 1229) are a potentially important source of high energy, low emittance electron beams with high peak currents generated within a relatively short distance. As such, they may have an important application in the driving of coherent light sources such as the Free Electron Laser (FEL) which operate into the x-ray region (McNeil and Thompson 2010 Nat. Photon.4 814–21). While novel plasma photocathodes (Hidding et al 2012 Phys. Rev. Lett.108 035001) may offer orders of magnitude improvement to the normalized emittance and brightness of electron beams compared to Radio Frequency-driven accelerators, a substantial challenge is the energy spread and chirp of beams, which can make FEL operation impossible. In this paper it is shown that such an energy-chirped, ultrahigh brightness electron beam, with dynamically evolving current profile due to ballistic bunching at moderate energies, can generate significant coherent radiation output via the process of Coherent Spontaneous Emission (CSE) (Campbell and McNeil 2012 Proc. FEL2012 (Nara, Japan)). While this CSE is seen to cause some FEL-induced electron bunching at the radiation wavelength, the dynamic evolution of the energy chirped pulse dampens out any high-gain FEL interaction. This work may offer the prospect of a future plasma driven FEL operating in the high-gain Self Amplified CSE mode. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A model of a free electron laser (FEL) operating with an elliptically polarised undulator is presented. The equations describing the FEL interaction, including resonant harmonic radiation fields, are averaged over an undulator period and generate a generalised Bessel function scaling factor, similar to that of planar undulator FEL theory. Comparison between simulations of the averaged model with those of an unaveraged model show very good agreement in the linear regime. Two unexpected results were found. Firstly, an increased coupling to harmonics for elliptical rather than planar polarisarised undulators. Secondly, and thought to be unrelated to the undulator polarisation, a significantly different evolution between the averaged and unaveraged simulations of the harmonic radiation evolution approaching FEL saturation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several methods have been proposed in the literature to improve free electron laser output by transforming the electron phase-space before entering the FEL interaction region. By utilizing ‘beam by design’ with novel undulators and other beam changing elements, the operating capability of FELs may be further usefully extended. This paper introduces two new such methods to improve output from electron pulses with large energy spreads and the results of simulations of these methods in the 1D limit are presented. Both methods predict orders of magnitude improvements to output radiation powers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of a broad bandwidth, two-colour free electron laser (FEL) amplifier using one monoenergetic electron beam are presented. The two-colour FEL interaction is achieved using a series of undulator modules alternately tuned to two well-separated resonant frequencies. Using the broad bandwidth FEL simulation code Puffin, the electron beam is shown to bunch strongly and simultaneously at the two resonant frequencies. Electron bunching components are also generated at the sum and difference of the resonant frequencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Free-electron lasers (FELs) operate at wavelengths from millimeter waves through hard x-rays. At x-ray wavelengths, FELs typically rely on self-amplified spontaneous emission (SASE). Typical SASE emission contains multiple temporal ‘spikes’ which limit the longitudinal coherence of the optical output; hence, alternate schemes that improve on the longitudinal coherence of the SASE emission are of interest. In this paper, we consider electron bunches that are shorter than the SASE spike separation. In such cases, the spontaneously generated radiation consists of a single optical pulse with better longitudinal coherence than is found in typical SASE FELs. To investigate this regime, we use two FEL simulation codes. One (MINERVA) uses the slowly-varying envelope approximation (SVEA) which breaks down for extremely short pulses. The second (PUFFIN) is a particle-in-cell simulation code that is considered to be a more complete model of the underlying physics and which is able to simulate very short pulses. We first anchor these codes by showing that there is substantial agreement between the codes in simulation of the SPARC SASE FEL experiment at ENEA Frascati. We then compare the two codes for simulations using electron bunch lengths that are shorter than the SASE slice separation. The comparisons between the two codes for short bunch simulations elucidate the limitations of the SVEA in this regime but indicate that the SVEA can treat short bunches that are comparable to the cooperation length.