Site design:  A. Charman (UC Berkeley)

WORKSHOP ON X-RAY FEL R&D

LBNL October 23-25, 2008

webpage visits

Workshop Goals

Free-electron lasers (FELs) are being designed and constructed to produce soft and hard coherent x-rays. To build and operate these facilities current designs require multi-GeV beams, large electron linacs, and hundred meter long undulators.  This leads to high facility construction and operation costs, and a very small number of facilities, thus limiting the availability of these breakthrough instruments to scientists in the physical, chemical, and biological areas.

At the same time many scientists are exploring a wide variety of FEL concepts, including new ideas and technologies, to improve present designs, reducing their size and cost, and extend the FEL characteristics  to new parameter regions, for example ultra-short attosecond pulses, extremely narrow bandwidth, and/or photon energy higher than  10 keV.

We propose a short workshop to review and examine new ideas and technologies, and evaluate the critical R&D required to advance FELs performance and reduce the cost of future FEL-based coherent X-ray sources. The main goals of the workshop are:

1)Provide an opportunity to discuss:

a. new ideas and concepts for the generation of coherent hard and soft X-rays.

b. advanced FEL technologies required to implement them including injector, main accelerator, undulators and beam distribution system into FEL arrays.

2)Obtain an overview of relevant FEL physics R&D capabilities, theoretical and experimental, in the US and abroad.

3)Assess the R&D needed to contribute to a major enhancement in the performance of future FELs, as measured by combinations of i) reduced cost, ii) reduced complexity iii) enhanced physics reach of the radiation source (wavelength, power, coherence, pulse duration, timing, etc.), and iv) better utilization of existing and future facilities  (eg, reusing beams, ….)

4) Prepare a white paper summarizing the results of the workshop, and the discussions of items 1)-3)