Attosecond-Angstrom free-electron-laser towards the cold beam limit

Abstract

Electron beam quality is paramount for X-ray pulse production in free-electron-lasers (FELs). State-of-the-art linear accelerators (linacs) can deliver multi-GeV electron beams with sufficient quality for hard X-ray-FELs, albeit requiring km-scale setups, whereas plasma-based accelerators can produce multi-GeV electron beams on metre-scale distances, and begin to reach beam qualities sufficient for EUV FELs. We show, that electron beams from plasma photocathodes many orders of magnitude brighter than state-of-the-art can be generated in plasma wakefield accelerators (PWFA), and then extracted, captured, transported and injected into undulators without quality loss. These ultrabright, sub-femtosecond electron beams can drive hard X-FELs near the cold beam limit to generate coherent X-ray pulses of attosecond-Angstrom class, reaching saturation after only 10 metres of undulator. This plasma-X-FEL opens pathways for novel photon science capabilities, such as unperturbed observation of electronic motion inside atoms at their natural time and length scale, and towards higher photon energies.

arXiv comment17 pages, 4 figures

References in corpus (14)

• Tunable Isolated Attosecond X-ray Pulses with Gigawatt Peak Power from a Free-Electron Laser
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• A tunable plasma-based energy dechirper
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• Direct observation of plasma waves and dynamics induced by laser-accelerated electron beams
• Terawatt attosecond X-ray source driven by a plasma accelerator
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• Chirp mitigation of plasma-accelerated beams using a modulated plasma density
• Two-Colour Free Electron Laser with Wide Frequency Separation using a Single Monoenergetic Electron Beam
• Tunable Electron Multibunch Production in Plasma Wakefield Accelerators

Cited by in corpus (2)

• High brightness, symmetric electron bunch generation in a plasma wakefield accelerator via a radially-polarized plasma photocathode
• Broadband coherent XUV light from $e^{-}/e^{+}$ microbunching in an intense laser pulse