Improving the Performance of an Ultrashort Soft X-ray Free-Electron Laser via Attosecond Afterburners

Abstract

In this study, we implement attosecond afterburners in an ultrashort soft X-ray free-electron laser (FEL) to improve the performance of generating attosecond pulses. In this scheme, the FEL pulse produced in the normal radiator section is dumped while the well bunched electron beam is reserved and reused in downstream afterburners. Subsequently, radiation in the afterburners gains rapidly as the bunching factor in the current spike is large, making the radiation pulse much shorter and cleaner than that from a normal radiator. Multi-shot simulations are carried out to demonstrate the performance and stability of the proposed technique.