Fast modeling of regenerative amplifier free-electron lasers

Abstract

High-gain free-electron lasers (FELs) are becoming important light sources at short wavelengths such as the EUV and x-ray regimes. A particularly promising concept is the regenerative amplifier FEL (RAFEL), which can greatly increase the brightness and stability of a single pass device. One of the critical challenges of the x-ray RAFEL is maintaining electron-optical overlap over the relatively large (hundreds of meters) footprint of the system. Numerical modeling of x-ray RAFELs with angular and positional errors is critical for designing stable cavities, as well as to predict signatures of specific misalignment effects. Full-scale simulations of x-ray FELs are incredibly time consuming, making large-scale parameter searches intractable on reasonable timescales. In this paper, we present a semi-analytical model that allows to investigate realistic scenarios—x-ray cavity without gain (“cold cavity” or x-ray FEL oscillator) and x-ray RAFEL—in the presence of angular/positional errors and electron trajectory oscillation. We especially focus on fast modeling of the FEL process and x-ray optics, while capturing effects pertaining to actual experimental setups at the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) at SLAC. Such a method can be used to explore RAFEL at other wavelengths by suitable replacement of the optics modeling.