Accelerator-driven X-ray Free Electron Lasers have brightness of many orders of magnitude higher than synchrotron light sources, and are currently opening up new frontiers across many areas of science. In this double seminar (25 + 25 min) the newly commissioned Swiss Free Electron Laser will be presented. Then, laser-plasma acceleration – a novel accelerator technology with promise to generate very compact, high brilliance photon source - is presented. The seminar is suited for students as well as staff.
SwissFEL, PSI’s X-ray Free Electron Lasers
by Dr. Hans Heinrich Braun - Project Leader Accelerator SwissFEL
SwissFEL is the new free electron laser (FEL) user facility at the Paul Scherrer Institut for experiments with intense X-ray pulses on the 1Å wavelength scale and femto-second pulse duration scale in a wide range of scientific applications. The facility is housed in a 740m long building and consists of a high brightness electron injector, a 5.8 GeV linear accelerator, the FEL proper and the experimental areas. Construction of SwissFEL was launched in 2013 after a preparatory R&D phase and was completed end of 2016. The 2017-18 period was used for commissioning of the FEL and the experiment stations. The latter included a series of pilot experiments. In 2019 regular user operation commences. In parallel a second FEL dedicated to soft X-ray experiments is under construction.
The talk will give an overview of SwissFEL, the technologies developed for this facility and the scientific program.
Laser-plasma accelerators and applications
by Dr. Eric Esaray, BELLA Center— Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
The basic physics of laser-plasma accelerators will be discussed, including a summary of experimental results obtained at LBNL on the production of 1-8 GeV electron beams. A brief survey of applications of LPAs to advanced light sources (XUV free electron lasers and Thompson scattered photons in the gamma regime) and high energy colliders will be presented.