Mathias Vogt

Experience with Multi-Beam and Multi-Beamline FEL-Operation

DESYs free-electron laser FLASH provides soft X-ray pulses for scientific users at wavelengths down to 4nm simultaneously in two undulator beamlines. They are driven by a common linear superconducting accelerator with a beam energy of up to 1.25 GeV. The superconducting technology allows the acceleration of electron bunch trains of several hundred bunches with a spacing of 1 microsecond or more and a repetition rate of 10 Hz. A fast kickerseptum system directs one part of the bunch train to FLASH1 and the other part to FLASH2 keeping the full 10 Hz repetition rate for both. The unique setup of FLASH allows independent FEL pulse parameters for both beamlines. In April 2016, simultaneous operation of FLASH1 and FLASH2 for external users started. This paper reports on our operating experience with this type of multi-beam, multi-beamline set-up.

Free-electron laser multiplex driven by a superconducting linear accelerator.

Free-electron lasers (FELs) generate femtosecond XUV and X-ray pulses at peak powers in the gigawatt range. The FEL user facility FLASH at DESY (Hamburg, Germany) is driven by a superconducting linear accelerator with up to 8000u2005pulses per second. Since 2014, two parallel undulator beamlines, FLASH1 and FLASH2, have been in operation. In addition to the main undulator, the FLASH1 beamline is equipped with an undulator section, sFLASH, dedicated to research and development of fully coherent extreme ultraviolet photon pulses using external seed lasers. In this contribution, the first simultaneous lasing of the three FELs at 13.4u2005nm, 20u2005nm and 38.8u2005nm is presented.

An Adaptive Mesh-Based Method for the Efficient Simulation of LSC-Driven Microbunching Gain in FEL Applications

Electron beamswith high peak current as they are required for the operation of free-electron lasers (FELs) are often generated by means of a series of magnetic bunch compressors. In conjunction with a collective coherent force, e.g. longitudinal space-charge (LSC), bunch compressors can possibly cause a wavelength dependent amplification of initial density inhomogeneities, potentially to an extent detrimental to the operation of the FEL. A common model, consisting of LSC, acceleration (kicks), and magnetic chicanes (drift-type maps), is governed by a time-discrete Vlasov-Poisson system. Such systems have been successfully simulated using mesh based representations of the phase space density (PSD) and the method of characteristics for the update step. However, for the irregular and exotic PSDs, prevalent in FEL applications, a homogeneous high resolution discretization on a naive rectangular mesh can be prohibitively wasteful. Here we present an approach based on adaptive tree refinement that addresses the complexity of the PSDs and allows for the efficient simulation of LSC-driven micro-bunching in FELs.