• H. Nishimura, S. Marks, D. Robin, D. Schlueter, C. Steier, W. Wan
  LBNL, Berkeley, California

The possibility exists of achieving significantly lower emittances in an electron storage ring by increasing its horizontal betatron tune. However, existing magnet locations and strengths in a given ring may be inadequate to implement such an operational mode. For example, the ALS storage ring could lower its emittance to one third of the current value by increasing the horizontal tune from 14.25 to 16.25. However, this would come with the cost of large chromaticities that could not be corrected with our existing sextupole magnets. We discuss such operational issues and possible options in this paper.

• H. Nishimura, R. J. Donahue, R. M. Duarte, D. Robin, F. Sannibale, C. Steier, W. Wan
  LBNL, Berkeley, California

We plan to commission top-off injection at the Advanced Light Source in the near future. In order to guarantee radiation safety, we have been simulating the injection process to exclude the possibility of injected electrons traveling down the user's photon beam lines. As the final stage of our simulation study, we use photon beam line CAD drawings to define the beam line's aperture in the phase space which electrons must not enter. Then we virtually inject electrons from within these phase spaces backwards into the storage ring to prove that such electrons can never get back to the real injection point under any possible scenario. This paper summarizes such inverse tracking studies.

• C. Steier, P. A. Heimann, S. Marks, D. Robin, R. W. Schoenlein, W. Wan
  LBNL, Berkeley, California
• W. Wittmer
  SLAC, Menlo Park, California

An upgraded femtosecond slicing facility has been commissioned successfully at the Advanced Light Source. In contrast to the original facility at the ALS which pioneered the concept, the new beamline uses an undulator (the first in-vacuum undulator at the ALS) as the radiator producing the user photon beam. To spatially separate the femtosecond slices in the radiator, a local vertical dispersion bump produced with 12 skew quadrupoles is used. The facility was successfully commissioned during the last 1.5 years and is now used in routine operation.

• C. Steier, B. J. Bailey, K. M. Baptiste, W. Barry, A. Biocca, W. E. Byrne, M. J. Chin, R. J. Donahue, R. M. Duarte, M. P. Fahmie, J. Gath, S. R. Jacobson, J. Julian, J.-Y. Jung, S. Kwiatkowski, S. Marks, R. S. Mueller, H. Nishimura, J. W. ONeill, S. Prestemon, D. Robin, S. L. Rossi, F. Sannibale, T. Scarvie, D. Schlueter, D. Shuman, G. D. Stover, CA. Timossi, T. Warwick, J. M. Weber, E. C. Williams
  LBNL, Berkeley, California

The Advanced Light Source is currently being upgraded for top-off operation. This major facility upgrade will provide an improvement in brightness from soft x-ray undulators of about one order of magnitude and keep the ALS competitive with the newest intermediate energy light sources. Major components of the upgrade include making the booster synchrotron capable of full energy operation, radiation safety studies, improvements to interlocks and collimation systems, diagnostics upgrades as well as emittance improvements in the main storage ring. The project status will be discussed as well as results of major parts of the commissioning.

• J. N. Corlett, J. M. Byrd, W. M. Fawley, M. Gullans, D. Li, S. M. Lidia, H. A. Padmore, G. Penn, I. V. Pogorelov, J. Qiang, D. Robin, F. Sannibale, J. W. Staples, C. Steier, M. Venturini, S. P. Virostek, W. Wan, R. P. Wells, R. B. Wilcox, J. S. Wurtele, A. Zholents
  LBNL, Berkeley, California

The FEL process increases radiation flux by several orders of magnitude above existing incoherent sources, and offers the additional enhancements attainable by optical manipulations of the electron beam: control of the temporal duration and bandwidth of the coherent output, and wavelength; utilization of harmonics to attain shorter wavelengths; and precise synchronization of the x-ray pulse with laser systems. We describe an FEL facility concept based on a high repetition rate RF photocathode gun, that would allow simultaneous operation of multiple independent FELs, each producing high average brightness, tunable over the soft x-ray-VUV range, and each with individual performance characteristics determined by the configuration of the FEL SASE, enhanced-SASE (ESASE), seeded, self-seeded, harmonic generation, and other configurations making use of optical manipulations of the electron beam may be employed, providing a wide range of photon beam properties to meet varied user demands. FELs would be tailored to specific experimental needs, including production of ultrafast pulses even into the attosecond domain, and high temporal coherence (i.e. high resolving power) beams.