Abstract
The very bright electron beam required for an x-ray free-electron laser (FEL), such as the linac coherent light source (LCLS), is susceptible to a microbunching instability in the magnetic bunch compressors, prior to the FEL undulator. The uncorrelated electron energy spread in the LCLS can be increased by an order of magnitude to provide strong Landau damping against the instability without degrading the FEL performance. To this end, a ``laser-heater'' system has been installed in the LCLS injector, which modulates the energy of a 135-MeV electron bunch with an IR-laser beam in a short undulator, enclosed within a four-dipole chicane. In this paper, we report detailed measurements of laser-heater-induced energy spread, including the unexpected self-heating phenomenon when the laser energy is very low. We discuss the suppression of the microbunching instability with the laser heater and its impact on the x-ray FEL performance. We also present the analysis of these experimental results and develop a three-dimensional longitudinal space charge model to explain the self-heating effect.
Highlights
The linac coherent light source (LCLS) is an x-ray freeelectron laser (FEL) that has achieved its first lasing and saturation at 1.5 Aradiation wavelength [1]
The very bright electron beam required for an x-ray free-electron laser (FEL), such as the LCLS, is susceptible to a microbunching instability in the magnetic bunch compressors that may increase the slice energy spread beyond the FEL tolerance [2,3,4,5,6,7]
A laser heater [6,8] has been suggested to add a small level of energy spread to the electron beam in order to Landau damp the microbunching instability before it potentially breaks up the high-brightness electron beam
Summary
The linac coherent light source (LCLS) is an x-ray freeelectron laser (FEL) that has achieved its first lasing and saturation at 1.5 Aradiation wavelength [1]. A laser heater [6,8] has been suggested to add a small level of energy spread to the electron beam in order to Landau damp the microbunching instability before it potentially breaks up the high-brightness electron beam. Such a system has been designed for the LCLS [7] and is incorporated in almost all short-wavelength FEL projects. We discuss the suppression of the microbunching instability with the laser heater and its impact on the x-ray FEL performance These measurements were performed with the nominal bunch charge of 250 pC for the LCLS operation.
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