Generation of large-bandwidth x-ray free-electron-laser pulses

Abstract

X-ray free-electron lasers (XFELs) are modern research tools in disciplines such as biology, material science, chemistry, and physics. Besides the standard operation that aims at minimizing the bandwidth of the produced XFEL radiation, there is a strong scientific demand to produce large-bandwidth XFEL pulses for several applications such as nanocrystallography, stimulated Raman spectroscopy, and multiwavelength anomalous diffraction. We present a self-consistent method that maximizes the XFEL pulse bandwidth by systematically maximizing the energy chirp of the electron beam at the undulator entrance. This is achieved by optimizing the compression scheme and the electron distribution at the source in an iterative back-and-forward tracking. Start-to-end numerical simulations show that a relative bandwidth of 3.25% full-width can be achieved for the hard x-ray pulses in the SwissFEL case.