Stimulated emission of THz coherent diffraction radiation in an optical cavity by a multibunch electron beam

Abstract

Accelerator-based terahertz (THz) radiation has been expected to realize a highpower broad-band source. Employing a low-emittance and short-bunch electron beam at a high repetition rate, a scheme to resonantly excite optical cavity modes of THz spectrum range via coherent diffraction radiation has been proposed. The confocal cavity design is the special case that resonance conditions of all the eigen modes coincide, resulting in realizing broad-band excitation. But in general cases of non-confocal cavities, the resonance condition depends on the mode, and the resonance peak becomes wide and weak. We performed an experiment with a non-confocal cavity as a follow-up experiment of that we have done with a confocal cavity. The result confirmed that the confocal design is the key for a broad-band source.