Dielectric Wakefield Accelerator to Drive the Future FEL Light Source

X-ray free-electron lasers (FELs) are expensive instruments and a large part of the cost of the entire facility is driven by the accelerator. Using a high-energy gain dielectric wake-field accelerator (DWA) instead of the conventional accelerator may provide a significant cost saving and reduction of the facility size. In this article, we investigate using a collinear dielectric wakefield accelerator to provide a high repetition rate, high current, high energy beam to drive a future FEL x-ray light source. As an initial case study, a ~100 MV/m loaded gradient, 850 GHz quartz dielectric based 2stage, wakefield accelerator is proposed to generate a main electron beam of 8 GeV, 50 pC/bunch, ~1.2 kA of peak current, 10×10 kHz (10 beamlines) in just 100 meters with the fill factor and beam loading considered. This scheme provides 10 parallel main beams with one 100 kHz drive beam. A drive-to-main beam efficiency ~38.5% can be achieved with an advanced transformer ratio enhancement technique. rf power dissipation in the structure is only 5 W/cm in the high repetition rate, high gradient operation mode, which is in the range of advanced water cooling capability. Details of study presented in the article include the overall layout, the transform ratio enhancement scheme used to increase the drive to main beam efficiency, main wakefield linac design, cooling of the structure, etc.