The temporal dynamics of a storage-ring Free Electron Laser is here investigated with particular attention to the case in which an external modulation is applied to the laser-electron beam detuning. The system is shown to produce bifurcations, multi-furcations as well as chaotic regimes. The peculiarities of this phenomenon with respect to the analogous behavior displayed by conventional laser ...

23.1 Relativistic Electron Beams U.S. Air Force Office of Scientific Research (Grant AFOSR 84-0026) National Science Foundation (Grant ECS 85-14517) U.S. Department of Energy (Contract DE-FGO5-84ER 13272) Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (Subcontract 6264005) George Bekefi During the past year we have undertaken four studies: 1) nonlinear characteristics of the free electron laser; 2) mea...

There is great interest in generating a terawatt (TW) hard X-ray free electron laser (FEL) that will enable coherent diffraction imaging of complex molecules like proteins and probe fundamental high-field physics. A feasibility study of producing such pulses was carried out employing a configuration beginning with an SASE amplifier, followed by a “self-seeding” crystal monochromator, and finish...

The Maryland Infrared Free-Electron Laser (MIRFEL) is under construction at the University of Maryland. MIRFEL, based on the Advanced Energy Systems CIRFEL, is a source of far-infrared (FIR) light for physics, medical, and materials science research. A project to investigate vibrational modes in DNA is currently planned. These vibrations may be involved in information transfer and gene transcri...

We expand the theory of the inverse free electron laser (IFEL) interaction to include the possibility of energy exchange that takes place when relativistic particles traversing an undulator interact with an electromagnetic wave of a frequency that is a harmonic of the fundamental wiggler resonant frequency. We derive the coupling coefficients as a function of the IFEL parameters for all harmoni...

Harmonic operation of a free-electron-laser amplifier is studied. The key issue investigated here is suppression of the fundamental. For a tapered amplifier with the right choice of parameters, it is found that the presence of the harmonic mode greatly reduces the growth rate of the fundamental. A limit on the reAection coefficient of the fundamental mode that will ensure stable operation is de...

The simplest high gain free electron laser (FEL) amplifier concept is proposed. A klystron amplifier has the useful property that the various electronic processes take place in separate portions of the amplifier, rather than overlapping as in FEL amplifier with an uniform undulator. The klystron consists of two fundamental parts: succession of 2-3 cascades (modulator), and an output undulator (...

Novel electron accelerator techniques can be used to create free electron lasers in a wide wave length interval extending to the X-ray region, i.e. providing an X-ray laser. Due to the coherent emission, very large intensities can be obtained, with peak brilliance ten orders of magnitude higher than in conventional synchrotron radiation. This opens completely new prospects for sciences that stu...

A thin dielectric slab over a conducting sheet is a low-loss slow-wave guiding system. When one introduces a magnetic wiggler into the system one may efficiently excite millimeter waves by passing a sheet electron beam just above the dielectric surface. For realistic parameters, the energy requirements on the beam are greatly reduced due to the wiggler. The frequency u, and the growth rate G ar...