Abstract
A longitudinal space charge amplifier (LSCA), operating in soft x-ray regime, was recently proposed. Such an amplifier consists of a few amplification cascades (focusing channel and chicane) and a short radiator undulator in the end. The broadband nature of LSCA supports generation of few-cycle pulses as well as wavelength compression. In this paper we consider an application of these properties of LSCA for generation of attosecond x-ray pulses. It is shown that a compact and cheap addition to the soft x-ray free-electron laser facility FLASH would allow one to generate 60 attosecond (FWHM) long x-ray pulses with the peak power at the 100 MW level and a contrast above 98%.
Highlights
Longitudinal space charge (LSC) driven microbunching instability [1,2] in electron linacs with bunch compressors was a subject of intense theoretical and experimental studies during the past years [3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10]
In this paper we describe the operation of the longitudinal space charge amplifier (LSCA)-based attosecond scheme in detail, exemplify it with the parameters of the soft x-ray free-electron laser facility FLASH [20,21], perform thorough numerical simulations, and discuss a possible implementation at FLASH making use of the existing infrastructure
In this undulator the electron beam is modulated in energy by a few-cycle powerful laser pulse [23] in the same way as it is suggested for free-electron laser (FEL)-based attosecond schemes [13,14,16,17,18,19]
Summary
Longitudinal space charge (LSC) driven microbunching instability [1,2] in electron linacs with bunch compressors (used as drivers of short wavelength FELs) was a subject of intense theoretical and experimental studies during the past years [3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10]. Such instability develops in infrared and visible wavelength ranges and can hamper electron beam diagnostics and free-electron laser (FEL) operation.
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