Beam Dynamics in a Linear Accelerator for Generations of Short Electron Beams and Femtosecond Hard X-ray Pulses

Abstract

We investigate a linear accelerator system capable of generating short electron beams and femtosecond hard X-ray pulses. We show a detailed design for a two-stage bunch compressor to generate the short electron beams in the linear accelerator. The bunch compressor system consists of two chicanes with a short system length that can compress an electron bunch of 0.6 nC and beam energy of 162 MeV, from 3 to 0.5 ps rms. One important design issue in the bunch compressor is to make as small growths of the emittance and energy spread as possible. The normalized horizontal emittance of 3 mm mrad is increased by approximately 10% due to coherent synchrotron radiation in the designed bunch compressor. Lattice distortions due to machine errors associate with quadrupole magnets, bending magnets and beam position monitors in the linear accelerator were investigated. It is shown that the lattice distortions due to the machine errors can be easily compensated by performing both orbit correction and dispersion correction in the linear accelerator. We have performed tolerance studies due to the various jitter sources in the linear accelerator to examine their sensitivities on the beam quality. From these results, it is shown that the linear accelerator system provides sufficient tolerances to maintain stable electron beams. We also investigated the generation of femtosecond hard X-ray pulses that may be provided by the interactions at 90° of the short electron beams in the linear accelerator with a laser system. It is shown that 3.4×106 photons within 10% bandwidth at 0.04 Å wavelength in about 350 fs rms pulse may be provided using the linear accelerator system. We presented studies on beam dynamics in the linear accelerator system that may provide the short beams and intense X-ray pulses.