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Preliminary studies of harmonic lasing have shown significant promise as a method to produce radiation at higher photon energies for a given electron energy and for a given undulator. The basic idea is to suppress radiation at the fundamental resonant wavelength, and allow radiation at a specific harmonic to grow exponentially without being driven by nonlinear processes at the fundamental. This has several potential benefits: higher photon energies for the same undulator field, plus significantly more power and smaller bandwidth compared to extracting nonlinear radiation at the harmonic after the fundamental has reached saturation. In this paper, we use beam parameters from the current design of LCLS-II to take a critical look at the challenge of suppressing radiation at the fundamental wavelength and to evaluate how much of an improvement in terms of photon energy reach and brightness can be achieved through harmonic lasing. For undulators with adjustable magnetic fields, a scheme is presented which can delay the onset of saturation at the fundamental wavelength by a factor of 2. Performance characteristics and especially spectral brightness are compared to self-seeded beam lines as an alternative method to reduce bandwidth, as well as with more conventional SASE beam lines.

In this paper we report on start-to-end simulation of a next generation light source based on a high repetition rate free electron laser (FEL) driven by a CW superconducting linac. The simulation integrated the entire system in a seamless start-to-end model, including birth of photoelectrons, transport of electron beam through 600 m of the accelerator beam delivery system, and generation of coherent x-ray radiation in a two-stage self-seeding undulator beam line. The entire simulation used the real number of electrons ($\ensuremath{\sim}2$ billion electrons/bunch) to capture the details of the physical shot noise without resorting to artificial filtering to suppress numerical noise. The simulation results shed light on several issues including the importance of space-charge effects near the laser heater and the reliability of x-ray radiation power predictions when using a smaller number of simulation particles. The results show that the microbunching instability in the linac can be controlled with 15 keV uncorrelated energy spread induced by a laser heater and demonstrate that high brightness and flux 1 nm x-ray radiation ($\ensuremath{\sim}{10}^{12}\text{ }\text{ }\mathrm{photons}/\mathrm{pulse}$) with fully spatial and temporal coherence is achievable.

We describe a technique for the generation of a solitary attosecond X-ray pulse in a free electron laser (FEL), via a process of self-amplified spontaneous emission. In this method, electrons experience an energy modulation upon interacting with laser pulses having a duration of a few cycles within single-period wiggler magnets. Two consecutive modulation sections, followed by compression in a dispersive section, are used to obtain a single, sub-femtosecond spike in the electron peak current. This region of the electron beam experiences an enhanced growth rate for FEL amplification. After propagation through a long undulator, this current spike emits a ~;250 attosecond X-ray pulse whose intensity dominates the X-ray emission from the rest of the electron bunch.