No Arabic abstract
A 60 MeV beam at the BNL Accelerator Test Facility (ATF) was manipulated by a planar tunable de-chirper made out of two 10 cm long dielectric slabs with copper plated backs. While the gap was changed from 5.8 mm to 1 mm, the correlated energy chirp of the low charge electron bunch was reduced from approximately 330 keV/mm to zero. This result is in agreement with simulations. Calculations show that similar devices, properly scaled to account for the expected electron bunch charge and length, can be used to remove residual correlated energy spread at the end of the linacs used for free-electron lasers (FEL). Potentially, this technique could significantly simplify linac design and improve FEL performance.
High quality electron beams with flat distributions in both energy and current are critical for many accelerator-based scientific facilities such as free-electron lasers and MeV ultrafast electron diffraction and microscopes. In this Letter we report on using corrugated structures to compensate for the beam nonlinear energy chirp imprinted by the curvature of the radio-frequency field, leading to a significant reduction in beam energy spread. By using a pair of corrugated structures with orthogonal orientations, we show that the quadrupole wake fields which otherwise increase beam emittance can be effectively canceled. This work also extends the applications of corrugated structures to the low beam charge (a few pC) and low beam energy (a few MeV) regime and may have a strong impact in many accelerator-based facilities.
We have directly measured THz wakefields induced by a subpicosecond, intense relativistic electron bunch in a diamond loaded accelerating structure via the wakefield acceleration method. We present here the beam test results from the first diamond based structure. Diamond has been chosen for its high breakdown threshold and unique thermoconductive properties. Fields produced by a leading (drive) beam were used to accelerate a trailing (witness) electron bunch which followed the drive bunch at a variable distance. The energy gain of a witness bunch as a function of its separation from the drive bunch describes the time structure of the generated wakefield.
The extreme electromagnetic fields sustained by plasma-based accelerators allow for energy gain rates above 100 GeV/m but are also an inherent source of correlated energy spread. This severely limits the usability of these devices. Here we propose a novel compact concept which compensates the induced energy correlation by combining plasma accelerating stages with a magnetic chicane. Particle-in-cell and tracking simulations of a particular 1.5 m-long setup with two plasma stages show that 5.5 GeV bunches with a final relative energy spread of $1.2times10^{-3}$ (total) and $5.5times10^{-4}$ (slice) could be achieved while preserving sub-micron emittance. This at least one order of magnitude below current state-of-the-art and paves the way towards applications such as Free-Electron Lasers.
We report observation of a strong wakefield induced energy modulation in an energy-chirped electron bunch passing through a dielectric-lined waveguide. This modulation can be effectively converted into a spatial modulation forming micro-bunches with a periodicity of 0.5 - 1 picosecond, hence capable of driving coherent THz radiation. The experimental results agree well with theoretical predictions.
Removal of residual linear energy chirp and intrinsic nonlinear energy curvature in the relativistic electron beam from radiofrequency linear accelerator is of paramount importance for efficient lasing of a high-gain free-electron laser. Recently, it was theoretically and experimentally demonstrated that the longitudinal wakefield excited by the electrons itself in the corrugated structure allows for precise control of the electron beam phase space. In this Letter, we report the first utilization of a corrugated structure as beam linearizer in the operation of a seeded free-electron laser driven by a 140 MeV linear accelerator, where a gain of ~10,000 over spontaneous emission was achieved at the second harmonic of the 1047 nm seed laser, and a free-electron laser bandwidth narrowing by about 50% was observed, in good agreement with the theoretical expectations.