Stability condition for the drive bunch in a collinear wakefield accelerator

The beam breakup instability of the drive bunch in the structure-based collinear wakefield accel- erator is considered and a stabilizing method is proposed. The method includes using the specially designed beam focusing channel, applying the energy chirp along the electron bunch, and keeping energy chirp constant during the drive bunch deceleration. A stability condition is derived that defines the limit on the accelerating field for the witness bunch.Comment: 10 pages, 6 figure

A wide bandwidth free-electron laser with mode locking using current modulation

A new scheme for mode locking a free-electron laser (FEL) amplifier is proposed based on electron beam current modulation. It is found that certain properties of the original concept (Thompson and McNeil 2008 Phys. Rev. Lett. 100 203901), based on the energy modulation of electrons, are improved, including the spectral brightness of the source and the purity of the series of short pulses. Numerical comparisons are made between the new and old schemes and between a mode-locked FEL and a self-amplified spontaneous emission FEL. Illustrative examples using a hypothetical mode-locked FEL amplifier are provided. The ability to generate intense coherent radiation with a large bandwidth is demonstrated

Investigation of Beam Instability Under the Effects of Long-Range Transverse Wake Fields in the Berkeley Future Light Source

An ultra-relativistic charged particle bunch moving through a resonator cavity leaves behind a wake field that will affect subsequent bunches (if the bunch is not ultra-relativistic, the wake field will not be exclusively behind it). If the initial bunch enters the cavity off-axis, it will produce a transverse wake field that can then kick later bunches off the axis. Thus, even bunches that were initially traveling on axis could be displaced and, in turn, produce their own transverse wake fields, affecting following bunches. The offsets obtained by bunches could increase along the bunch train, leading to the so-called multi-bunch beam break-up instability [1]. The purpose of our investigation is to see whether such instability will occur in the superconducting, 1.3 GHz, 2.5GeV linac (see Table 1) planned for the Berkeley future light source (BFLS). We assume an initial steady-state situation established for machine operation; i.e. a continuous process where every bunch follows the same trajectory through the linac, with only small deviations from the axis of the rf structures. We will look at a possible instability arising from a bunch having a small deviation from the established trajectory. Such a deviation would produce a wake field that is slightly different from the one produced by the bunches following the established trajectory. This could lead to subsequent bunches deviating further from the established trajectory. We will assume the deviations are small (at first) and so the difference in the wake field caused by a bunch not traveling along the established trajectory is well approximated by a long-range transverse dipole wake. We are concerned only with deviations from the established trajectory; thus, in our models, a transverse position of zero corresponds to the bunch traveling along the established trajectory. Under this assumption, only the additional long-range transverse dipole wake remains in our models

A new type of bunch compressor and seeding of a short-wavelength coherent radiation.

Transverse-to-longitudinal emittance exchange was proposed in [1] as a tool for an effective matching of the electron beam phase space to requirements of a possible application. Here we propose a new purpose, namely, use of two consecutive emittance exchanges equipped with the telescope between them for a bunch compression that can be done without the energy chirp in the electron bunch. In principle it allows to reduce the electron peak current in the linac by moving the bunch compressor to the end of the linac and, thus, to relax collective effects associated with high peak currents. It is also possible to have a split-action compression when the first part is done inside the low-energy part of the linac and the second and final part is done after the linac. We also demonstrate how proposed bunch compressor can be used for frequency up-conversion of the energy modulation provided by the laser interacting with the electron beam and thus can prepare a significantly higher frequency seed for seeded free-electron lasers. The same approach can be used for a frequency down-conversion that can be useful for generation of THz radiation

Development of a 2D Vlasov Solver for Longitudinal BeamDynamics in Single-Pass Systems

Direct numerical methods for solving the Vlasov equation offer some advantages over macroparticle simulations, as they do not suffer from the numerical noise inherent in using a number of macroparticles smaller than the bunch population. Unfortunately these methods are more time-consuming and generally considered impractical in a full 6D phase space. However, in a lower-dimension phase space they may become attractive if the beam dynamics is sensitive to the presence of small charge-density fluctuations and a high resolution is needed. In this paper we present a 2D Vlasov solver for studying the longitudinal beam dynamics in single-pass systems of interest for X-FEL's, where characterization of the microbunching instability is of particular relevance. The solver includes a model to account for the smearing effect of a finite horizontal emittance on microbunching. We explore the effect of space charge and coherent synchrotron radiation (CSR). The numerical solutions are compared with results from linear theory and good agreement is found in the regime where linear theory applies