Phase synchronization recovery in energy-compressed LWFA electron beams for free-electron lasers via undulator tapering

TL;DR

This paper demonstrates that undulator tapering can effectively restore phase synchronization and enhance FEL performance when using energy-compressed LWFA electron beams, despite their inherent energy spread and fluctuations.

Contribution

It introduces a method of using longitudinal undulator tapering to compensate for energy chirp-induced resonance mismatch in LWFA-driven FELs, improving power and spectral quality.

Findings

Tapered undulators restore electron-radiation phase synchronization.

Significant improvements in saturation power and spectral properties achieved.

Scheme remains effective despite shot-to-shot energy fluctuations.

Abstract

Laser wakefield accelerators (LWFAs) are attractive compact drivers for free-electron lasers (FELs) because they can generate femtosecond electron beams with high peak current over centimeter-scale acceleration distances. However, their relatively large energy spread remains a major obstacle to high-gain FEL operation. Although bunch energy compression can reduce the slice energy spread to a level suitable for FEL amplification, it also introduces a strong energy chirp. The energy chirp detunes the FEL resonance along the planar undulator, causing phase slippage between the electrons and the radiation field, reduced bunching efficiency, and degraded radiation power and spectral quality. Here we investigate a longitudinally tapered undulator for compensating the chirp-induced resonance mismatch in a self-amplified spontaneous-emission (SASE) FEL driven by an energy-compressed LWFA beam. Using three-dimensional unaveraged simulations, we show that an optimized taper profile restores electron-radiation phase synchronization and significantly improves both the saturation power and the spectral properties relative to the untapered case. We also assess the sensitivity of the scheme to shot-to-shot beam-energy fluctuations characteristic of LWFA operation. Our results show that undulator tapering is an effective method for mitigating chirp-induced performance degradation in compact plasma-based FELs.