Erice School-Workshop “Trends in Free Electron Laser Physics”

A very remarkable advance in Free Electron Laser (FEL) Physics has been recently achieved at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC). In the Linear Coherent Light Source (LCLS) at SLAC, it has been demonstrated for the first time the possibility of producing very intense FEL at 1 Angstrom exploiting the Self Amplified Spontaneous Emission (SASE) mechanism.
 

The successful operation of LCLS as user facility has also raised the demands for better radiation quality (higher photons coherence) and more compact device (meters scale) as the one required for medical application and research activities in University laboratories. 
 

A number of possible solutions to improve FEL temporal coherence have been recently proposed, for example Single Spike mode, Seeding or Self Seeding mechanisms, Quantum FEL scheme, etc. Promising ideas for compactness are also envisaged but still a convenient solution has not been proven. A lot of interest is now devoted also in the spectral region of gamma rays, photon energy up to now accessible only by Compton radiation sources. A recently proposed quantum theory of FEL, to which increasing attention is given in the literature, appears to pave the way also for a compact sub-Angstrom coherent FEL device. Possible experiment to test this theory will be also discussed.

The School/Workshop will be organized in order to have introductory lectures on basic FEL topics in the morning sessions and invited and contributed talks on advanced FEL physics in the afternoon sessions. A poster session will be also organized.