BBU effect in an ERL-FEL two-purpose test facility

Abstract

Both the energy recovery linac (ERL) and the free electron laser (FEL) are considered to be candidate fourth generation light sources. It is proposed to combine an FEL into an ERL facility to integrate the advantages of both, and to realize a compact two-purpose light source. A test facility to verify this principle is being designed at the Institute of High Energy Physics, Beijing. One main concern is the beam breakup (BBU) instability which limits the available beam current. To this end, we developed a numerical simulation code to calculate the BBU threshold, which is found to have only a small reduction even in a high-FEL-bunch-charge operation mode, compared with that in the case with ERL bunches only. However, even with the ERL beam current far below the BBU threshold, we observed a fluctuation of the central orbit of the ERL bunches in the presence of an FEL beam. We then present a physical model of BBU and understand the mechanism of the orbit-fluctuation in an ERL-FEL two-purpose machine. We found that by choosing an appropriate FEL bunch repetition rate, the central orbit fluctuation amplitude can be well controlled.