USTRAT/SUPA, Glasgow, United Kingdom
STFC/DL/ASTeC, Daresbury, Warrington, Cheshire, United Kingdom
A review is presented of some of the methods and their origins that have recently been proposed to improve the temporal coherence of SASE output. These methods do not require any external laser seed field, or the use of the so-called self-seeding methods, where the SASE radiation is optically filtered and improved at an early stage of the interaction before re-injection and amplification to saturation. By using methods that introduce an additional relative propagation between the electron beam and the radiation field, the localised collective interaction, which leads to the formation of the ‘spiking’ associated with normal SASE output, is removed. The result is output pulses which are close to the fourier transform limit without the need for any external seeds or intermediate optics.
