FLASHForward is a beam-driven plasma wakefield accelerator located at Deutsches Elektronen Synchrotron (DESY) in Hamburg, Germany. Within the FLASHForward project, laser-driven as well as beam-driven plasma waves enable acceleration of electron beams with energies from tens of MeV to a few GeV. The characterization of these electrons is important to control and improve this acceleration technique.The production of inverse Compton scattering (ICS) offers a possibility to measure electron beam parameters due to the dependence of the produced photons on the electron parameters. A numerical study of ICS radiation produced in experiments at FLASHForward was performed, using an ICS simulation code and the results from particle-in-cell simulations. The possibility of determining electron beam properties from measurements of the x-ray source was explored for a wide range of experimental conditions.The simulations show that the measurement of electron spectrum and divergence is in principle possible with the detection of ICS photons. In addition, transverse probing of the electron beam using ultra-short laser pulses allows to obtain longitudinal information about the electron beam in multi shot experiments. However, the detection of the produced ICS radiation, with photon energies of several MeV for the electron beams of interest, remains challenging.1. A. Aschikhin et al. “The FLASHForward facility at DESY,” Nucl. Instruments Methods Phys. Res. Sect. A Accel. Spectrometers, Detect. Assoc. Equip. 806 (2016).2. W. J. Brown and F. V. Hartemann, “Three-dimensional time and frequency-domain theory of femtosecond x-ray pulse generation through Thomson scattering,” Phys. Rev. Spec. Top. - Accel. Beams, 7, 060703 (2004).3. R. A. Fonseca et al., “OSIRIS: A Three-Dimensional, Fully Relativistic Particle in Cell Code for Modeling Plasma Based Accelerators,” Computational Science — ICCS 2002, 2331 (2002).4. T. Mehrling et al., “HiPACE: a quasi-static particle-in-cell code,” Plasma Phys. Control. Fusion 56, 8 (2014)
