LANL, Los Alamos, New Mexico, USA
We report our comparison study on the first stage electron bunch compression schemes at 750 MeV using a conventional and a double C-chicane for the X-ray free electron laser (XFEL) under development for the Matter-Radiation Interactions in Extremes (MaRIE) initiative at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Compared to the performance of the conventional C-chicane bunch compressor, the double C-chicane scheme exhibits the capability of utilizing the transverse momentum shift induced by the coherent synchrotron radiation in the second C-chicane to compensate that generated in the first C-chicane, resulting in a compressed electron bunch with minimized transverse momentum shift along the beam. It is also found that the double C-chicane scheme can be designed to significantly better preserve the beam emittance in the course of the bunch compression. This is particularly beneficial for the MaRIE XFEL whose lasing performance critically depends on the preservation of the ultralow beam emittance.
LANL, Los Alamos, New Mexico, USA
The microbunching instability in linear accelerators can significantly increase the energy spread of an electron beam. The instability can be suppressed by artificially increasing the random energy spread of an electron beam, but this leads to unacceptably high energy spreads for future XFEL systems. One possibility of suppressing this instability is to use laser assisted bunch compression (LABC) instead of the second chicane in an XFEL system, thereby eliminating the cascaded chicane effect that magnifies the microbunching instability. An experiment is proposed at ATF to test this concept, and numerical simulations of the experiment are shown.
