Physical Review Accelerators and Beams (Mar 2025)

First high peak and average power single-pass THz free-electron laser in operation

  • Mikhail Krasilnikov,
  • Zakaria Aboulbanine,
  • Gowri Adhikari,
  • Namra Aftab,
  • Aida Asoyan,
  • Prach Boonpornprasert,
  • Hakob Davtyan,
  • Georgi Georgiev,
  • James Good,
  • Anna Grebinyk,
  • Matthias Gross,
  • Andreas Hoffmann,
  • Ekkachai Kongmon,
  • Xiangkun Li,
  • Anusorn Lueangaramwong,
  • David Melkumyan,
  • Sandeep Mohanty,
  • Raffael Niemczyk,
  • Anne Oppelt,
  • Houjun Qian,
  • Christopher Richard,
  • Frank Stephan,
  • Grygorii Vashchenko,
  • Tobias Weilbach,
  • Xiaoyang Zhang,
  • Markus Tischer,
  • Evgeny Schneidmiller,
  • Pavel Vagin,
  • Mikhail Yurkov,
  • Ekaterina Zapolnova,
  • Wolfgang Hillert,
  • Jörg Rossbach,
  • Axel Brachmann,
  • Norbert Holtkamp,
  • Heinz-Dieter Nuhn

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevAccelBeams.28.030701
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 28, no. 3
p. 030701

Abstract

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We report on the operation of the first high peak and average power single-pass terahertz free-electron laser (THz FEL) based on a high-brightness photoinjector for developing a THz source for pump-probe experiments at advanced x-ray FELs (XFELs). Electron beams with 17 MeV/c momentum and charge up to 2.4 nC were used to generate narrow-band 3 THz radiation with pulse energies of more than 0.1 mJ. The novelty of the realized method is that the undulator radiation by electron beams is much longer than the radiation wavelength, with FEL starting from coherent beam contribution rather than shot noise. This proved to be not a simple scaling of the XFEL mechanism due to the significant role of the bunching factor in the considered case.