Two-color beam generation based on wakefield excitation

Several beam manipulation methods have been studied and experimentally tested to generate two-color photon beams in free electron laser facilities to accommodate the user requests. We propose to use the interaction of the beam with an oscillating longitudinal wakefield source to obtain a suitable electron beam structure. The bunch generates two subpulses with different energies and delayed in time passing through a magnetic chicane after its longitudinal phase space has been modulated by the wakefield source. According to this approach the power of the emitted radiation is not degraded compared to the monochromatic beam, and the setup in the machine is quite simple because the bunch is manipulated only in the high energy section, where it is more rigid. We present the design applied to SwissFEL. We identified the parameters and the corresponding range of tunability of the time and energy separation among the two subbunches.