Tim Plath

Mapping few-femtosecond slices of ultra-relativistic electron bunches

Free-electron lasers are unique sources of intense and ultra-short x-ray pulses that led to major scientific breakthroughs across disciplines from matter to materials and life sciences. The essential element of these devices are micrometer-sized electron bunches with high peak currents, low energy spread, and low emittance. Advanced FEL concepts such as seeded amplifiers rely on the capability of analyzing and controlling the electron beam properties with few-femtosecond time resolution. One major challenge is to extract tomographic slice parameters instead of projected electron beam properties. Here, we demonstrate that a radio-frequency deflector in combination with a dipole spectrometer not only allows for single-shot extraction of a seeded FEL pulse profile, but also provides information on the electron slice emittance and energy spread. The seeded FEL power profile can be directly related to the derived slice emittance as a function of intra-bunch coordinate with a resolution down to a few femtoseconds.

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 8000 pulses 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 13.4 nm, 20 nm and 38.8 nm is presented.

Confining continuous manipulations of accelerator beam-line optics

Altering the optics in one section of a linear accelerator beamline will in general cause an alteration of the optics in all downstream sections. In circular accelerators, changing the optical properties of any beamline element will have an impact on the optical functions throughout the whole machine. In many cases, however, it is desirable to change the optics in a certain beamline section without disturbing any other parts of the machine. Such a local optics manipulation can be achieved by adjusting a number of additional corrector magnets that restore the initial optics after the manipulated section. In that case, the effect of the manipulation is confined in the region between the manipulated and the correcting beamline elements. Introducing a manipulation continuously, while the machine is operating, therefore requires continuous correction functions to be applied to the correcting quadrupole magnets. In this paper we present an analytic approach to calculate such continuous correction functions for six quadrupole magnets by means of a homotopy method. Besides a detailed derivation of the method, we present its application to an algebraic example, as well as its implementation at the seeding experiment sFLASH at the free-electron laser FLASH located at DESY in Hamburg.

Operation of Free Electron Laser FLASH Driven by Short Electron Pulses

The program of low charge mode of operation is under development at free electron laser FLASH aiming in single mode radiation pulses. A short pulse photoinjector laser has been installed at FLASH allowing production of ultrashort electron pluses with moderate compression factor of the beam formation system. Here we present pilot results of free electron laser FLASH operating at the wavelength λ = 13.1 nm and driven by 70 pC electron bunches. Relevant theoretical analysis has been performed showing good agreement with experimental results.