Coherent soft x-ray generation in the water window with the EEHG scheme∗

Recently a scheme entitled echo-enabled harmonic generation (EEHG) was proposed for producing short wavelength FEL radiation that allows far higher harmonic numbers to be accessed as compared with the normal limit arising from incoherent energy spread. In this paper we study the feasibility of a single EEHG stage to generate coherent radiation in the ”water window” (24 nm wavelength) directly from a UV seed laser at 190-nm wavelength. We present time-dependent simulation results which demonstrate that the single-stage EEHG FEL can generate high power soft x-ray radiation in the water window with narrow bandwidth close to Fourier transform limit directly from a UV seed laser. The schemes to generate short x-ray pulse from femtosecond to attosecond using EEHG FEL are also discussed.