Physics design of the high brightness linac for the advanced free-electron laser initiative at Los Alamos

Abstract

Abstract Free-electron lasers and high energy physics accelerators have increased the demand for very high brightness electron-beam sources. This paper describes the design of an accelerator that can produce beams of greater than 7×10 11 A/m 2 (brightness equal to 21/ϵ 2 , with ϵ = 90% normalized emittance, equivalent to four times the rms emittance). The beam emittance growth in the accelerator is minimized by: producing a short electron bunch in a high gradient rf cavity, using a focusing solenoid to correct the emittance growth caused by space charge, and designing the coupling slots between accelerator cavities to minimize quadrupole effects. The simulation code PARMELA was modified for this design effort. This modified version uses SUPERFISH output files for the accelerator cavity fields, MAFIA output files for the 3-D perturbation fields caused by the coupling slots in the accelerator cells, and POISSON output files for the solenoid field in the gun region. The results from simulations are, at 2.3 nC, a peak current of 180 A and a 90% emittance of 6.4π mm mrad, and, at 4 nC a peak current of 300 A and a 90% emittance of 9.4π mrad. The exit energy from the linac is 20 MeV for both cases. A magnetic pulse compressor can be used to further increase the peak current.