Speaker
Description
Dephasingless high-field (>10-100 GV/m) plasma wakefield accelerators in the blowout regime can nowadays be experimentally realized in compact hybrid LWFA-PWFA accelerators [1]. These hybrids are ideal platforms for hosting plasma photocathodes [2], which require PWFA in the blowout regime for robust injection of ultralow (few tens of nm-rad) normalized emittance beams, and for emittance preservation at this level. We are in the process of developing these unique compact “high-field plasma photocathode PWFA” to produce electron beams with superior brightness, which then can robustly drive (X)-FELs at unprecedented gains. These “Strong-Gain XFELs” based on “High-Field PWFA” offer prospects for enhanced robustness and tunability, where brute-force lasing is enabled by the sheer brightness budget of the beams. At the same time, the Strong-Gain XFEL process can have highly desirable impact on photon-pulse quality and compactness, with saturation and therefore undulator lengths reduced to only a few meters.
These prospects make such systems potentially game-changing for the democratization and industrialization of XFEL technology. This contribution discusses the physics, as well as the scientific and industrial potential, of Strong-Gain XFELs driven by High-Field PWFAs at several operating points.
[1] Hidding et al., Phys. Rev. Letters 104, 195002 (2010)
[2] Kurz, Heinemann et al., Nat. Comm.12, 2895 (2021)
[3] Hidding et al., Phys. Rev. Letters 108, 035001 (2012)
[4] Deng, Karger et al., Nat. Phys. 15, 1156–1160 (2019)
[5] P. Ufer, A. Nutter et al., under review
[6] Habib et al., Nat. Comm. 14, 1054 (2023)
[7] Berman et al., https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.0640
| Working group | WG6 |
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