Speaker
Description
X-ray free-electron lasers currently rely on kilometre-scale linear accelerators to produce very high quality electron beams with GeV energies. Plasma-based accelerators are a highly compact alternative with a drastically higher accelerating gradient and smaller footprint. Here, we show in simulation how beams from a plasma wakefield accelerator (PWFA) could drive a robust and tunable compact soft XFEL using the plasma photocathode injection method. Operating in a beam-loaded regime, single low-energy injected bunches produce sub-millijoule energy radiation pulses in the water-window from 2.3-4.4 nm. Furthermore the FEL output is resilient to large drive-beam charge jitter and can be maintained over a large range of witness beam working points. Additionally, we investigate how such beams could be created at the possible future UK-XFEL facility using realistic drive beams from the linac, and how these beams may be used to reach very hard X-ray energies.
