Timing and low-level rf system for an x-ray laser

Abstract

An x-ray free-electron laser (XFEL), SACLA, designed to open up new science, was constructed for generating coherent x rays with a peak power of more than 10 GW and a very short pulse of below 30 fs. This feature demands a very highly short-term temporal stability of less than 50 fs to the acceleration rf field of SACLA. For this reason, we developed a timing and low-level rf (LLRF) system for SACLA based on that of the SPring8 compact SASE source (SCSS) test accelerator for verifying the feasibility of an XFEL. The performance of the system using the in-phase and quadrature rf manipulation method was improved from SCSS's system. Since the facility length of SACLA is 700 m, which is 10 times longer than that of the SCSS test accelerator, a phase-stabilized optical-fiber system designed to transmit time standard rf signals with low loss was also developed and deployed. This optical-fiber system equips fiber optical-length feedback control in order to mitigate environmental effects, such as temperature and humidity changes. On the other hand, the demanded maximum rf temporal stability is less than 50 fs, which is almost 10 times smaller than that of the SCSS test accelerator. Hence, reducing electric noise and increasing the temperature stability around timing and LLRF instruments were necessary and realized with a very low-noise power supply and a hemathermal 19-inch enclosure. The short-term temporal performance of the timing LLRF system finally attained a temporal stability of less than 13.6 fs in rms measured by a beam arrival-time measurement. This stability greatly helps to achieve the stable x-ray lasing of SACLA for routine operation during user experiments.