Free-Electron Lasers Driven by Laser Plasma Accelerators

Laser-plasma accelerators (LPAs) have the potential to drive compact free-electron lasers (FELs). Even with LPA energy spreads typically at the percent level, the e-beam brightness can be excellent, due to the low normalized emittance (< 0.5 mu m) and high peak current (multi-kA) resulting from the ultra-short e-beam duration (few fs). It is critical, however, that in order to mitigate the effect of percent-level energy spread, one has to actively manipulate the phase-space distribution of the e-beam. We provide an overview of the methods proposed by the various LPA FEL research groups. At the BELLA Center at LBNL, we are pursuing the use of a chicane for longitudinal e-beam decompression (therefore greatly reducing the slice energy spread), in combination with short-scale-length e-beam transportation with an active plasma lens and a strong-focusing 4-m-long undulator. We present ELEGANT & GENESIS simulations on the transport and FEL gain, showing strong enhancement in output power over the incoherent background, and present estimates of the 3D gain length for deviations from the expected e-beam properties (varying e-beam lengths and emittances). To highlight the role of collective effects, we also present ELEGANT & GENESIS simulation results.