Plasma boosted electron beams for driving Free Electron Lasers

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates through simulations that plasma-based post-acceleration can effectively double electron beam energy, enabling high-brightness beams suitable for driving free electron lasers with significant photon output.

Contribution

It introduces a plasma post-acceleration scheme driven by a high-power laser to enhance electron beam energy for FEL applications, validated by detailed simulations.

Findings

Electron beams are doubled in energy up to 1 GeV.

The boosted beams produce approximately 10^{11} photons per shot at 2.7 nm.

The scheme is compatible with existing FEL injection and undulator setups.

Abstract

In this paper, we report results of simulations, in the framework of both EuPRAXIA \cite{Walk2017} and EuPRAXIA@SPARC\_LAB \cite{Ferr2017} projects, aimed at delivering a high brightness electron bunch for driving a Free Electron Laser (FEL) by employing a plasma post acceleration scheme. The boosting plasma wave is driven by a tens of \SI{}{\tera\watt} class laser and doubles the energy of an externally injected beam up to \GeV{1}. The injected bunch is simulated starting from a photoinjector, matched to plasma, boosted and finally matched to an undulator, where its ability to produce FEL radiation is verified to yield $O(\num{e11})$ photons per shot at \nm{2.7}.