Design study of an echo-enabled harmonic generation free electron laser for the 24th harmonics

Abstract

In this paper, we present an echo-enabled harmonic generation (EEHG) scheme to generate a free electron laser (FEL). The EEHG FEL utilizes two modulators and two chicanes that can generate a high harmonic density modulation with a low initial beam energy modulation. Using the beam parameters of a 150-MeV electron accelerator, we show that the EEHG scheme enhances FEL performance and generates coherent radiation with a wavelength of 100 nm. In this scheme, the 150-MeV electron beam is energy-modulated by using two lasers with wavelengths of 800 and 2400 nm. The modulated electron beam is sent to two chicanes whose dispersive strengths are 8.2 and 1.0 mm to convert energy modulation to density modulation. Finally, the density-modulated electron beam is sent to a radiator that is tuned to a wavelength of 100 nm and generates radiation with a peak power of 0.3 GW. We performed simulations of the laser-beam interaction by using the GENESIS code and showed that intense coherent radiation with a wavelength of 100 nm could be achieved from the two seeding lasers under the designed EEHG scheme.