High-quality electron beams pave the way for more compact and affordable X-ray free-electron lasers.
Scientists at the X-ray free electron laser SwissFEL have demonstrated that exceptional electron beam quality can offset the need for extreme accelerator energy at these advanced light sources. High-performance X-ray free-electron lasers act like ultra-fast cameras, capturing chemical reactions and mapping matter at the atomic scale. Traditionally, generating the shortest-wavelengths X-ray pulses required driving particle accelerators to massive energy levels. Instead of relying purely on brute force, researchers managed to achieve high-power, atomic-scale X-ray pulses by dramatically improving the brilliance of the electron beam, directly compensating for lower machine energy. This made it possible to operate the free-electron laser in a regime with very small electron oscillations in the undulator – a regime long thought to be impractical for high-power hard X-ray generation. The approach – already proven in user experiments – shows that optimizing beam quality can reduce energy demands, paving the way for smaller and more affordable X-ray free-electron laser facilities worldwide.
Read more on the PSI website
Image: The undulator beamline at SwissFEL, where technological developments have enabled scientists to generate X-ray pulses with wavelengths below one Angstrom using much lower machine energies than are typically required.
Credit: © Paul Scherrer Institute PSI/Markus Fischer