Towards one machine, two purposes: using a common SC linac for XFEL and ERL simultaneously

Abstract

The linac based XFEL and ERL are advanced (or, say, 4th generation) light sources, with different electron beam parameters and different advantages. However, the linac used for XFEL and ERL should provide very advanced beams with high energy, high peak and/or average current, very low emittance and low energy spread, thus making the linac very complicated and expensive. To share the XFEL and ERL advantages and save the construction-operation budget, a proposal of using a common superconducting electron linac for hard X-ray XFEL and ERL is described in this paper. The interactions between the XFEL and ERL beams via the accelerating structure are studied and the result is positive.