Abstract
A design for a compact x-ray light source (CXLS) with flux and brilliance orders of magnitude beyond existing laboratory scale sources is presented. The source is based on inverse Compton scattering of a high brightness electron bunch on a picosecond laser pulse. The accelerator is a novel high-efficiency standing-wave linac and RF photoinjector powered by a single ultrastable RF transmitter at x-band RF frequency. The high efficiency permits operation at repetition rates up to 1 kHz, which is further boosted to 100 kHz by operating with trains of 100 bunches of 100 pC charge, each separated by 5 ns. The entire accelerator is approximately 1 meter long and produces hard x-rays tunable over a wide range of photon energies. The colliding laser is a Yb:YAG solid-state amplifier producing 1030 nm, 100 mJ pulses at the same 1 kHz repetition rate as the accelerator. The laser pulse is frequency-doubled and stored for many passes in a ringdown cavity to match the linac pulse structure. At a photon energy of 12.4 keV, the predicted x-ray flux is $5 \times 10^{11}$ photons/second in a 5% bandwidth and the brilliance is $2 \times 10^{12}\mathrm{photons/(sec\ mm^2\ mrad^2\ 0.1\%)}$ in pulses with RMS pulse length of 490 fs. The nominal electron beam parameters are 18 MeV kinetic energy, 10 microamp average current, 0.5 microsecond macropulse length, resulting in average electron beam power of 180 W. Optimization of the x-ray output is presented along with design of the accelerator, laser, and x-ray optic components that are specific to the particular characteristics of the Compton scattered x-ray pulses.
Highlights
The main rationale for new x-ray sources is that since their discovery in 1895, x rays have been the single most powerful technique for determining the structure of all forms of condensed matter
In this paper we focus on the properties of a linacbased compact x-ray light source (CXLS) in preference to ring-based output
Each of the three beams—laser, electron, and x ray—are present at the very small interaction point (IP), as for any beam brought to a tight focus, a lens is required nearby with a large numerical aperture
Summary
The main rationale for new x-ray sources is that since their discovery in 1895, x rays have been the single most powerful technique for determining the structure of all forms of condensed matter. In the present paper we aim to exploit recent advances in accelerator and laser technologies to produce a compact x-ray light source (CXLS) that offers the potential for a more powerful x-ray source of appropriate size, complexity, and cost for modern laboratories and hospitals. The baseline CXLS performance will not match the standard of large 3rd and 4th generation facilities, CXLS sources are expected to provide x-ray parameters similar to that of bending magnet synchrotron beam lines for a small fraction of the cost, far beyond existing lab source performance, and in some parameters such as pulse length and source size, will significantly exceed what is possible at the major facilities. Its qualitative and quantitative impact on x-ray science is likely to be enormous, in ways that are difficult to foresee because a source with this brilliance, size, and cost does not exist today
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