| Paper | Title | Page |
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| TUPPH002 | The Photonic FEL: Toward a Handheld THz FEL | 231 |
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Low energy, slow wave, electron beam based radiation devices, like travelling wave tubes and Cerenkov free-electron lasers, have the disadvantage that the gain seriously degrades when the operating frequency is upscaled from microwave to teraHertz frequencies. Here we propose to obtain a successful scaling with what may be called a photonic free-electron laser (pFEL). In our approach, a photonic structure serves for phase matching the radiation field to a set of copropagating electron beams. This follows an earlier suggestion based on distributed feedback*. The photonic structure additionally provides transverse coupling between the individual electron beams, such that phase locking through the interaction with the radiation field leads to the generation of transversly coherent radiation. This phase locking mechanism allows power scaling by extending the number of parallel beams propagating through the structure. We expect to be able to produce Watt-level output at THz frequencies from a handheld device and will present the basic ideas behind this concept.
* V. G. Baryshevsky, K. G. Batrakov. Nucl. Instr. and Meth. A507, 35 (2003). |