Beyond the Limits of 1D Coherent Synchrotron Radiation

TL;DR

This paper extends 1D coherent synchrotron radiation theory to better model CSR effects at magnet boundaries, compares simulation approaches, and validates findings with experiments at the FERMI FEL facility, highlighting the importance of transverse effects.

Contribution

It introduces an improved CSR simulation module in GPT that accounts for transverse bunch effects and benchmarks it against other models and experimental data.

Findings

Extended 1D CSR theory to entrance and exit of bending magnets.

Better agreement with experiments when transverse effects are included.

Significant deviations from traditional 1D CSR predictions in extreme compression scenarios.

Abstract

An understanding of collective effects is of fundamental importance for the design and optimisation of the performance of modern accelerators. In particular, the design of an accelerator with strict requirements on the beam quality, such as a free electron laser (FEL), is highly dependent on a correspondence between simulation, theory and experiments in order to correctly account for the effect of coherent synchrotron radiation (CSR), and other collective effects. A traditional approach in accelerator simulation codes is to utilise an analytic one-dimensional approximation to the CSR force. We present an extension of the 1D CSR theory in order to correctly account for the CSR force at the entrance and exit of a bending magnet. A limited range of applicability to this solution, in particular in bunches with a large transverse spot size or offset from the nominal axis, is recognised. More recently developed codes calculate the CSR effect in dispersive regions directly from the Lienard-Wiechert potentials, albeit with approximations to improve the computational time. A new module of the General Particle Tracer (GPT) code was developed for simulating the effects of CSR, and benchmarked against other codes. We experimentally demonstrate departure from the commonly used 1D CSR theory for more extreme bunch length compression scenarios at the FERMI FEL facility. Better agreement is found between experimental data and the codes which account for the transverse extent of the bunch, particularly in more extreme compression scenarios.