Speaker
Description
The conditioning and initial commissioning activities of the STAR (Southern Europe Thomson Back-scattering Source for Applied Research) facility are currently underway at the University of Calabria in southern Italy. STAR is a compact X-ray source based on inverse Compton scattering (ICS) between a relativistic electron beam and an intense laser pulse. During this initial phase, all major subsystems have been installed, tested, and brought into operational condition, enabling the first acceleration of electron beams and the successful transport of both the electron and laser beams to the interaction point.
Electron acceleration is achieved using an S-band RF photoinjector followed by an S-band linear accelerator and two C-band accelerating structures. This configuration allows electron bunch energies to be tuned between 60 MeV and 150 MeV. The UV-laser–driven electron beam has reached energies up to about 100 MeV, able to reach 150 MeV with charges exceeding 200 pC and a temporal duration of approximately 5 ps (FWHM). In parallel, the high-energy infrared laser pulse (500 mJ, 5 ps) has been transported and characterized at the interaction point with a scanning resolution over the electron beam below 1ps.
Once fully operational, STAR is designed to operate as a user-oriented light source providing monochromatic, tunable, and polarized X-ray radiation. The system will generate picosecond X-ray pulses with photon energies in the range of 40–350 keV. The STAR project, including its planned high-energy upgrade, has been developed in collaboration with the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) and is coordinated by the INFN National Laboratories of Frascati together with the INFN Milan Division and the LASA laboratory.
The results obtained so far represent a key milestone toward the generation and optimization of ICS X-rays at the STAR facility.
| Working group | WG6 |
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