Energy Recovery Linac Prototype Research Articles

Inverse Compton backscattering source driven by the multi-10 TW laser installed at Daresbury

AbstractInverse Compton scattering is a promising method to implement a high brightness, ultra-short, energy tunable X-ray source at accelerator facilities. We have developed an inverse Compton backscattering X-ray source driven by the multi-10 TW laser installed at Daresbury. Hard X-rays, with spectral peaks ranging from 15 to 30 keV, depending on the scattering geometry, will be generated through the interaction of laser pulses with electron bunches delivered by the energy recovery linac machine, initially known as energy recovery linac prototype and subsequently renamed accelerators and lasers in combined experiments. X-ray pulses containing 9 × 107 photons per pulse will be created from head-on collisions, with a pulse duration comparable to the incoming electron bunch length. For transverse collisions 8 × 106 photons per pulse will be generated, where the laser pulse transit time defines the X-ray pulse duration. The peak spectral brightness is predicted to be ~1021 photons/(s mm2 mrad2 0.1% Δλ/λ).

EUROFEL: Europe Tackles Key Issues of Free Electron Lasers

During the last few years Europe has made enormous progress towards free electron laser (FEL)-based research infrastructures. The FLASH facility [1] at DESY in Hamburg, Germany, has been in user operation since the summer of 2005; FERMI@Elettra [2] in Trieste, Italy, is under construction; the European XFEL [3] in Hamburg will start construction in summer 2008; and several other FEL projects are being prepared in France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Sweden, Switzerland and the UK. In addition, a number of dedicated test facilities have become available, including the photo-injector test facility (PITZ) [4] and the cryomodule test bench (CMTB) [5] at DESY, the HoBiCaT facility for testing superconducting cavities [6] at BESSY, Berlin, Germany, the SPARC facility [7] at INFN-LNF in Frascati, Italy, and the ERL Prototype (ERLP) [8] at Daresbury Laboratory, UK. They have been strongly supported by the national stakeholders in order to prepare the design of new FEL sources.