Nonlinear numerical simulations on the MIT microwave free electron laser

Abstract

One-dimensional nonlinear simulations are carried out on an energy changing microwave free electron laser to investigate the effect of nonlinearity in the large signal regime. In the small signal regime, a temporal macropulse envelope which is observed in experiments is simulated well. The simulations also show the gain spectrum and saturation of the FEL. Since the calculations are done in a single frequency mode at this stage, we need to conduct a multi-frequency simulation to include all phenomena in a future work.