| Paper | Title | Page |
|---|---|---|
MOP073 |
Chirped Pulse Amplification in a Seeded Free-electron Laser: Design of a Test Experiment at FERMI | |
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| In solid-state lasers, frequency chirping is employed to stretch a short pulse prior to amplification, mitigating the problems related to high power in the active medium. After amplification, the chirp is compensated in order to recover short pulse duration and, hence, high peak power. Chirped pulse amplification (CPA) in seeded FEL’s relies on a similar principle: the seed pulse is stretched in time before interacting with the electron beam. This permits one to create bunching on a larger number of electrons, and to (approximately) linearly increase the output energy of the generated FEL pulse. In ideal conditions, the chirp carried by the phase of the seed pulse is transmitted to the output phase of the FEL pulse. Chirp compensation after the last undulator allows production of a short (ideally Fourier-transformed) pulse and, therefore, a larger peak power with respect to what obtained, for the same conditions, in standard (i.e., no-chirp-on-the-seed) operation mode. In this paper, we present the preparatory studies (i.e., numerical simulations and compressor design), which have been carried out at FERMI, in view of performing the first test experiment of CPA on a seeded FEL. | ||