X-ray free electron laser linear accelerator without a laser heater
Linear accelerator based X-ray free electron laser (FEL) light sources provide an important tool for scientific discoveries. Most of these light source facilities employ a laser heater to increase the electron beam’s uncorrelated energy spread to suppress microbunching instability through the linear accelerators. In this paper, we first studied the microbunching instability in an X-ray FEL linear accelerator with lower initial peak current (~ 10 A) and moderate final peak currents (1-2 kA). In this regime, the microbunching instability can be substantially mitigated with modest initial uncorrelated energy spread. Here, we then suggested a less expensive method to mitigate the microbunching instability using a section of low beta FODO lattice instead of the laser heater. With the use of the high brightness electron beam from a photoinjector, the intrabeam scattering effect inside the beam through the FODO lattice can generate sufficient uncorrelated energy spread to mitigate the microbunching instability. At last, we demonstrated the feasibility of this method with self-consistent solution of the Fokker–Planck equation through the X-ray FEL linear accelerator.