At the BELLA Center at LBNL, we are pursuing the demonstration of a high gain free electron laser (FEL) using an electron beam generated by a laser plasma accelerator (LPA) with an ultimate goal of developing a compact, high brightness VUV/x-ray source. A new dedicated 100TW-class laser system now delivers pulses of 2.5J and 40 fs duration (at 5 Hz repetition). After an upgrade with a...
Here we review the status of Inverse Free Electron Laser as a high gradient advanced accelerator presenting recent results on applications of IFEL beams for X-ray generation and the demonstration of high repetition rate laser acceleration using this efficient advanced accelerator scheme. We will then discuss the next steps in the development of IFEL. In particular we analyze the possibility...
The Free Electron Laser (FEL) application of Laser plasma acceleration (LPA) requires the handling of energy spread and divergence. The COXINEL (ERC340015) manipulation line designed and built at SOLEIL [1, 2] consists of variable permanent magnet quadrupoles [3] for divergence mitigation and a decompression chicane for energy sorting, enabling FEL amplification. The COXINEL line, installed at...
Plasma wakefield accelerators (PWFAs) are routinely accelerating electron beams to multi-GeV energies in cm-scale acceleration distances. This emerging technology is a promising approach towards ultra-compact X-ray free-electron lasers (XFELs). However, producing high-quality electron beams in plasma-based accelerators is still a challenging task. The R&D efforts within the community now...
