SLAC, Menlo Park, California, USA
Stanford University, Stanford, California, USA
SLAC, Menlo Park, California, USA
The timescale for electron motion in molecular systems is on the order of hundreds of attoseconds, and thus the time-resolved study of electronic dynamics requires a source of sub-femtosecond x-ray pulses. Here we report the experimental generation of sub-femtosecond duration soft x-ray free electron laser (XFEL) pulses with hundreds of microjoules of energy using fresh-slice amplification in two cascaded stages at the Linac Coherent Light Source. In the first stage, an enhanced self-amplified spontaneous emission (ESASE) pulse is generated using laser-shaping of the electron beam at the photocathode*. The electron bunch is then delayed relative to the pulse by a magnetic chicane, allowing the radiation to slip onto a fresh slice of the bunch, which amplifies the ESASE pulse in the second cascade stage. Angular streaking** characterizes the experimental pulse durations as sub-femtosecond at ~465 eV in the experiment.
* Zhang, Z. et al. New J. Phys. 22 (2020)
** Li, S. et al. Optics Express 26.4 (2018): 4531-4547.
WEOZGD2
SLAC, Menlo Park, California, USA
Plasma-driven light source development has recently made significant progress with the demonstration of plasma-FEL gain and the work of multiple facilities towards plasma-FEL development *. In this paper, we report on the status and prospects for one-such plasma-driven light source effort, the Plasma-driven Attosecond X-ray (PAX) experiment at FACET-II ** . This unique experimental thrust seeks to generate 100-attosecond long electron beams using plasma accelerators and use these beams as drivers for an attosecond X-ray source. This approach is motivated by the possibility to generate ultra-short high power attosecond X-ray pulses, as well as the order-of-magnitude increased tolerances of this method to emittance, energy spread and pointing jitter compared to a plasma-driven XFEL starting from noise. We present recent experimental developments in the process of demonstrating this concept at FACET-II and discuss potential extensions of this method to scale towards shorter wavelengths in the future.
* W. Wang et al Nature 595, 516 2021; R. Pompili Proc. of EAAC 2021; C. Emma et al High Power Laser Science and Engineering, 2021, Vol. 9, e57,
** C. Emma et al APL Photonics 6, 076107 2021
SLAC, Menlo Park, California, USA
The Plasma-driven Attosecond X-ray source (PAX) project at FACET-II aims to produce attosecond EUV/soft x-ray pulses with milijoule-scale pulse energy via nearly coherent emission from pre-bunched electron beams. In the baseline approach*, a beam is generated using the density downramp injection scheme with a percent-per-micron chirp and 1e-4 scale slice energy spread. Subsequent compression yields a current spike of just 100 as duration which can emit 10 nm light nearly coherently due to its strong pre-bunching. In this work, we report simulation studies of a scheme to generate similarly short beams without relying on plasma injection. Instead, we utilize a high-charge beam generated at an RF photocathode, with its tail acting as the witness bunch for the wake. The witness develops a percent-per-micron chirp in the plasma which is then compressible downstream. The final bunch length demonstrated here is as short as 100 nm, and is limited primarily by emittance effects. The configurations studied in this work are available for experimental testing at existing PWFA facilities such as FACET-II.
*APL Photonics 6, 076107 (2021)
SLAC, Menlo Park, California, USA
Intrabeam scattering (IBS) is becoming an increasingly important effect in the design of high-brightness linear electron accelerators due to the ever-increasing transverse brightness of beams produced from radiofrequency photoinjectors. The existing theory describing the energy spread growth rate due to IBS was derived in the context of circular machines where the beam particles are frequently and randomly colliding, and therefore should only be applied to non-laminar, emittance dominated flow. This is not the case in the injector portion of a linear accelerator, where the beam is space-charge dominated and the flow is laminar. The different nature of the microscopic motion in the two cases demands a reevaluation of the applicability of IBS theory to the photoinjector. In this work, we present a simple analytic model for energy spread growth during perfectly laminar flow and show that it matches well to point-to-point multiparticle simulations. In this way we demonstrate that stochastic energy spread growth in laminar beams is more attributable to the initial random placement of the particles in the bunch rather than the traditional temperature rearrangement mechanism of IBS.