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.
