Physical design of a wavelength tunable fully coherent VUV source using self-seeding free electron laser

TL;DR

This paper presents a preliminary design for a fully coherent VUV free electron laser with broad wavelength tunability (70-170 nm) using a self-seeding scheme and adjustable undulator gaps, optimized for user needs.

Contribution

It introduces a novel wavelength tuning approach for a VUV FEL using fixed electron energy and adjustable undulator gaps across subareas.

Findings

The scheme achieves acceptable performance in simulations.

Wavelength tuning is feasible by adjusting undulator gaps.

Dividing the range into subareas simplifies the design.

Abstract

In order to meet requirements of the synchrotron radiation users, a fully coherent VUV free electron laser (FEL) has been preliminarily designed. One important goal of this design is that the radiation wavelength can be easily tuned in a broad range (70-170 nm). In the light of the users' demand and our actual conditions, the self-seeding scheme is adopted for this proposal. Firstly, we attempt fixing the electron energy and only changing the undulator gap to varying the radiation wavelength, but the analysis implies that it is difficult because of the great difference of the power gain length and FEL efficiency at different wavelength. Therefore, dividing the wavelength range into three subareas is considered. In each subarea, a constant electron energy is used and the wavelength tuning is realized only by adjusting the undulator gap. The simulation results shows that this scheme has an acceptable performance.