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A compact damping ring with limited circumference of about 160 m is proposed for producing kilowatt-level coherent EUV radiation. The electron bunch in the ring is modulated by a 257nm wavelength laser with the help of the angular dispersion induced micro-bunching method [C. Feng and Z. Zhao, Sci. Rep. 7, 4724 (2017)]. Coherent radiation at 13.5 nm with an average power of about 2.5 kW can be achieved with the state-of-the-art accelerator and laser technologies.

The physical design for a novel low-energy compact-storage-ring-based extreme ultraviolet (EUV) light source was systemically studied. The design process considers the linear and nonlinear beam optics, including transverse matching and the optimization of the dynamic aperture, momentum aperture, and beam lifetime. With a total circumference of 36.7 m and a beam energy of 400 MeV, the storage ring can operate with an average beam current of up to 1 A. With the undulator as the radiator, this facility has the potential to emit EUV radiation at 13.5 nm with an average power exceeding 10 W within the bandwidth. In addition, the collective instabilities of the lattice at high beam current were analyzed; it was found that the typical instabilities which may occur in an electron storage ring can be reasonably controlled in our design. With the advantages of variable beam energy and current, this design exhibits great promise as a new candidate for various EUV lithographical applications requiring tunable radiation power.

The surface plasmon polaritons make the emittance of the electron beam emitted from the photocathode complicated. In this article, numerical investigations are carried out to study the influence of the plasmonic near field (PNF) excited by a square hole array on the beam emittance. The characteristics of the emittance induced by PNF are studied. The coupling between the emittance caused by PNF and the original intrinsic emittance due to the excess energy of electrons and the surface roughness of the cathode is discussed. The results provide insights into the suppression of the emittance caused by PNF and new possibilities to break the limits of the nature of the materials, improving the performance of a photocathode.

The echo-enabled harmonic generation (EEHG) scheme holds promising prospects for efficiently generating intense coherent radiation at very high harmonics of the initial seed laser. In this paper, we study the feasibility of operating the Shanghai X-ray free-electron laser test facility with a single stage EEHG setup. With a combination of existing numerical codes, start-to-end simulations considering various three-dimensional effects have been carried out to show the possible performance of the EEHG FEL. Simulation results demonstrate that a single stage EEHG can generate high power soft X-ray radiation pulses with narrow bandwidth directly from UV seed lasers. With the help of the harmonic lasing technique or upgraded linac, we also show the possibility of generating coherent soft X-ray radiation in the “water window” with a single stage EEHG.

In this paper we describe a new method for the realization of two-color femtosecond radiation pulses in a seeded free-electron laser (FEL). The two-color pulses are obtained from two electron bunches and a chirped seeding laser. Compared to the previous methods based on seeded FELs, our method has the advantages of producing two-color FEL pulses with more flexible tunability both in the pulse durations and separations. Numerical simulations for the Dalian Coherent Light Source confirm that femtosecond XUV pulses with variable pulse durations and time delay can be directly generated from a chirped seed laser at 250 nm by using this technique. We also show the possibility of performing a proof-of-principle experiment of this technique based on the Shanghai Deep-Ultraviolet FEL facility.

Herein, a feasible method is proposed to compensate the high-order effect during bunch length compression, thereby enhancing the peak current of a high-repetition-rate X-ray free-electron laser source. In the proposed method, the corrugated structure is inserted downstream of the high-order harmonic cavities to function as a passive linearizer and enhance the longitudinal profile of the electron beam. Three-dimensional simulations are performed to analyze the evolution of the longitudinal phase space, and the results demonstrate that the profile of the electron beam is improved and the peak current can be easily optimized to over 2 kA with a bunch charge of 100 pC.

Besides the original seeded undulator line, in the Soft X-ray free-electron laser (SXFEL) user facility at Shanghai, a second undulator line based on self-amplified spontaneous emission is proposed to achieve 2 nm laser pulse with extremely high brightness. In this paper, the beam energy deviation induced by the undulator wakefields is numerically obtained, and it is verified to have a good agreement between 3D and 2D simulation results. The beam energy loss along the undulator degrades the expected FEL output performance. Impact of wakefields on pulse energy, radiation power and spectrum is discussed, as well as the benefits of compensation obtained with a taper in the undulator field. And using the planned SXFEL diagnostic, a longitudinal wakefields measurement experiment is proposed and simulated., Comment: 10 pages, 9 figures, submitted to Chinese Physics C

High quality electron beams with flat distributions in both energy and current are critical for many accelerator-based scientific facilities such as free-electron lasers and MeV ultrafast electron diffraction and microscopes. In this Letter we report on using corrugated structures to compensate for the beam nonlinear energy chirp imprinted by the curvature of the radio-frequency field, leading to a significant reduction in beam energy spread. By using a pair of corrugated structures with orthogonal orientations, we show that the quadrupole wake fields which otherwise increase beam emittance can be effectively canceled. This work also extends the applications of corrugated structures to the low beam charge (a few pC) and low beam energy (a few MeV) regime and may have a strong impact in many accelerator-based facilities., 5 pages, 5 figures

A new scheme to generate narrow-band tunable terahertz (THz) radiation using a variant of the echo-enabled harmonic generation is analyzed. We show that by using an energy chirped beam, THz density modulation in the beam phase space can be produced with two lasers having the same wavelength. This removes the need for an optical parametric amplifier system to provide a wavelength-tunable laser to vary the central frequency of the THz radiation. The practical feasibility and applications of this scheme are demonstrated numerically with a start-to-end simulation using the beam parameters at the Shanghai Deep Ultraviolet Free-Electron Laser facility (SDUV). The central frequency of the density modulation can be continuously tuned by either varying the chirp of the beam or the momentum compactions of the chicanes. The influence of nonlinear rf chirp and longitudinal space charge effect have also been studied in our article. The methods to generate the THz radiation in SDUV with the new scheme and the estimation of the radiation power are also discussed briefly.

The microbunching instability in the linear accelerator (linac) of a free-electron laser facility has always been a problem that degrades the electron beam quality. In this paper, a quite simple and inexpensive technique is proposed to smooth the electron beam current profile to suppress the instability. By directly adding a short undulator with a transverse gradient field right after the injector to couple the transverse spread into the longitudinal direction, additional density mixing in the electron beam is introduced to smooth the current profile, which results in the reduction of the gain of the microbunching instability. The magnitude of the density mixing can be easily controlled by varying the strength of the undulator magnetic field. Theoretical analysis and numerical simulations demonstrate the capability of the proposed technique in the accelerator of an x-ray free-electron laser.

Laser-plasma based accelerator has the potential to dramatically reduce the size and cost of future x-ray light sources to the university-laboratory scale. However, the large energy spread of the laser-plasma accelerated electron beam may hinder the way for short wavelength free-electron laser generation. In this paper, we propose a novel method for directly imprinting strong coherent micro-bunching on the electron beam with large intrinsic energy spread by using a wavefront-tilted conventional optical laser beam and a weak dipole magnet. Theoretical analysis and numerical simulations demonstrate that this technique can be used for the generation of fully coherent femtosecond soft x-ray radiation at gigawatts level with a very short undulator.

Microbunching instability usually exists in the linear accelerator (linac) of a free electron laser (FEL) facility. If it is not controlled effectively, the beam quality will be damaged seriously and the machine will not operate properly. In the electron linac of a soft X-Ray FEL device, because the electron energy is not very high, the problem can become even more serious. As a typical example, the microbunching instability in the linac of the proposed Shanghai Soft X-ray Free Electron Laser facility (SXFEL) is investigated in detail by means of both analytical formulae and simulation tools. In the study, a new mechanism of introducing random noise into the beam current profile as the beam passes through a chicane-type bunch compressor is proposed. The higher-order modes that appear in the simulations suggest that further improvement of the current theoretical model of the instability is needed., Comment: 7 pages, 15 figures. arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1304.7437