Abstract
The compact linear accelerator for research and applications (CLARA) is an ultrabright electron beam test facility being developed at STFC Daresbury Laboratory. The ultimate aim of CLARA is to test advanced free electron laser (FEL) schemes that can later be implemented on existing and future short-wavelength FELs. In addition, CLARA is a unique facility to provide a high-quality electron beam to test novel concepts and ideas in a wide range of disciplines and to function as a technology demonstrator for a future United Kingdom x-ray FEL facility. CLARA is being built in three phases; the first phase, or front end (FE), comprises an S-band rf photoinjector, a linac, and an S-bend merging with the existing versatile electron linear accelerator beam line; the second phase will complete the acceleration to full beam energy of 250 MeV and also incorporate a separate beam line for use of electrons at 250 MeV; and the third phase will include the FEL section. The CLARA FE was commissioned during 2018, and the facility was later made available for user experiments. Significant advancements have been made in developing high-level software and a simulation framework for start-to-end simulations. The high-level software has been successfully used for unmanned rf conditioning and for characterization of the electron beam. This paper describes the design of the CLARA FE, performance of technical systems, high-level software developments, preliminary results of measured beam parameters, and plans for improvements and upgrades. © 2020 authors. Published by the American Physical Society.
Highlights
Free electron lasers (FELs) are sources of electromagnetic radiation with an exceptional set of properties, and as such there is worldwide interest in their development for a wide range of applications
Virtual Machine Environment (VME) is used for electronic trigger generation across the facility and for pulse numbering in VME Field-programmable Gate Array (FPGA)-based data acquisition systems
It retains the use of the Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System (EPICS) [71] software toolkit and input-output controllers (IOCs) running the Linux operating system on the PC/x64 platform but extends this architecture to support the additional requirements of compact linear accelerator for research and applications (CLARA)
Summary
Free electron lasers (FELs) are sources of electromagnetic radiation with an exceptional set of properties, and as such there is worldwide interest in their development for a wide range of applications. These sources are used in the operating Relativistic Electron Gun for Atomic Exploration (REGAE) electron diffraction user facility [12] and for the Short Innovative Bunches and Accelerators at DESY (SINBAD) facility which is under commissioning [13] Both sources are developed for operation with ultralow, sub to few pC bunch charges and a repetition rate of 50 Hz. Among the sources operating with noninterchangeable copper photocathodes, the 1.6-cell S-band electron source of the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) FEL user facility at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) should be mentioned, which operates at a record cathode field of 115 MV=m [14].
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