SALOME: An Accelerator for the Practical Course in Accelerator Physics

SALOME (Simple Accelerator for Learning Optics and the Manipulation of Electrons) is a short low energy linear electron accelerator built by the University of Hamburg. The goal of this project is to give the students the possibility to obtain hands-on experience with the basics of accelerator physics. In this contribution the layout of the device will be presented. The most important components of the accelerator will be discussed and an overview of the planned demonstration experiments will be given

Thermal Simulation of an Energy Feedback Normal Conducting RF Cavity

Thermal simulation has been performed for an energy feedback normal conducting RF cavity. The cavity is going to be used as a fast actuator to regulate the arrival time of the electron bunches in fs level in FLASH. By measuring the arrival time jitter of one bunch in a bunch train, the designed cavity apply a correcting accelerating or decelerating voltage to the next bunches. The input power of the cavity is provided by a solid state amplifier and will be coupled to the cavity via a loop on the body. To achieve the fs level precision of the arrival time, the cavity should be able to provide accurate accelerating voltage with a precision of 300 eV. We performed thermal simulation to find out the temperature distribution of the cavity and make sure that heating will not affect its voltage precision. The simulation results show that by using two input loops the coupling constant will vary from 4.11 to 4.13 during the operation of the cavity which effect on the bunchs' arrival time would be less than 0.25 fs. While using just one input loop can lead to an error of about 1 fs

Design of New Buncher Cavity for Relativistic Electron Gun for Atomic Exploration – REGAE

The Relativistic Electron Gun for Atomic Exploration, REGAE, is a small electron accelerator build and operated at DESY. Its main application is to provide high quality electron bunches for time resolved diffraction experiments. The RF system of REGAE contains different parts such as low level RF, preamplifier, modulator, phase shifter, and cavities. A photocathode gun cavity to produce the electrons and a buncher cavity to compress the electron bunches in the following drift tube. Since the difference between the operating mode of the existing buncher and its adjacent mode is too small, the input power excites the other modes in addition to the operating mode which affects the beam parameters. A new buncher cavity is designed in order to improve the mode separation. Furthermore the whole cavity is modeled by a circuit which can be useful especially during the tuning process. Beam dynamics simulations have been performed in order to compare the new designed cavity with the old one which declare that the effects of the adjacent modes on the beam parameters are decreased

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

Status of the sFLASH Experiment

The sFLASH experiment at the free-electron laser (FEL) FLASH1 is a setup for the investigation of external FEL seeding. Since 2015, the seeding scheme high-gain harmonic generation (HGHG) is being studied. At the end of the seeded FEL, an RF deflector enables time-resolved analysis of the seeded electron bunches while the photon pulses can be characterized using the technique of THz streaking. In this contribution, we present the current configuration of the experiment and give an overview of recent experimental results

New test of modulated electron capture decay of hydrogen-like ¹⁴²Pm ions: Precision measurement of purely exponential decay

An experiment addressing electron capture (EC) decay of hydrogen-like 142Pm60+ions has been conducted at the experimental storage ring (ESR) at GSI. The decay appears to be purely exponential and no modulations were observed. Decay times for about 9000 individual EC decays have been measured by applying the single-ion decay spectroscopy method. Both visually and automatically analysed data can be described by a single exponential decay with decay constants of 0.0126(7)s−1 for automatic analysis and 0.0141(7)s−1 for manual analysis. If a modulation superimposed on the exponential decay curve is assumed, the best fit gives a modulation amplitude of merely 0.019(15), which is compatible with zero and by 4.9 standard deviations smaller than in the original observation which had an amplitude of 0.23(4)