TUOAI02
ANL, Argonne, USA
SLAC, Menlo Park, California, USA
TISNCM, Troitsk, Russia
LBNL, Berkeley, California, USA
Elettra-Sincrotrone Trieste S.C.p.A., Basovizza, Italy
The Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) has produced extremely bright hard x-ray pulses using self-amplified spontaneous emission (SASE) since 2009. In SASE, the electron beam shot noise initiates the FEL gain, resulting in output radiation characterized by poor temporal coherence and a fluctuating spectrum whose normalized width is given by the FEL bandwidth. Recently, colleagues at DESY suggested a self-seeding scheme for the LCLS to reduce the bandwidth*. Here, the SASE produced in the first half of the undulator line is put through a simple diamond-based monochromator; the resulting monochromatic light trailing the main SASE pulse is used to seed the FEL interaction in the downstream undulators. We report on the experimental results implementing such a scheme at the LCLS, in which we have measured a reduction in bandwidth by a factor of 40-50 from that of SASE at 8-9 keV. The self-seeded FEL operates close to saturation, with the maximum output energy approximately equal to that with no seeding for low charge. The observed level of power fluctuations in the seeded output is presently rather large, and future plans focus on discovering their origins and reducing their magnitude.
* Geloni, V. Kocharyan ,and E.L. Saldin, DESY 10-133, arXiv:1008.3036 (2010)
