Abstract We report on the status of the Inverse Free Electron Laser accelerator experiment under construction at the UCLA Neptune Laboratory. This experiment will use a 400 GW CO 2 laser to accelerate through a tapered undulator an electron beam from 14.5 MeV up to 55 MeV. The scheme proposed is the diffraction dominated IFEL interaction where the Rayleigh range of the laser beam is 3.5 cm, much shorter than the interaction length (the undulator length is 50 cm). The undulator is strongly tapered in both field and period. The present status of the experiment is reported
