​Photoinjector and Seed Lasers

The CLARA FEL test facility is a normal conducting 250 MeV linear accelerator designed to longitudinally and transversely bright electron bunches with femtosecond shot-to-shot timing stability.  These bunches will be used to seed a single pass FEL in a variety of schemes designed to evaluate the physical and technological requirements of next generation X-ray light sources.

Femtosecond laser systems are critical in order to meet the challenges presented by a state-of-the-art linear accelerator such as CLARA.  This includes three dimensional shaping of ultraviolet laser pulses, used to generate the electron bunches at the start of the accelerator.  Lasers and laser-derived electromagnetic sources can interest directly with the electron bunches to initiate and control the final x-ray or UV lasing action.  Concepts developed in the diagnostic of femtosecond laser pulses can also be extended in aim of characterizing the final FEL output in time and space.

Optical beam-based diagnostics

The FLT group are responsible for the optical beam-based alignment diagnostics systems that image the CLARA electron bunch on a number of target YAG screens.  These enable measurements of the transverse profile with a spatial resolution of >20 μm with fields of view up to 35 mm – encompassing the entire beam pipe.  3D printing techniques have been used to create custom mounts to hold the target screens.  High sensitivity CMOS cameras are capable of both acquiring images and supplying data to the accelerator controls architecture at the machine repetition rate (400 Hz).

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