Variable parameter free electron laser

Conference · Wed Aug 01 04:00:00 EDT 1979

OSTI ID:6056719

Morton, P L

The recent successful operation of the free electron laser by the group at Stanford and the availability of high power electron beams has stimulated a great deal of interest in the use of the free electron laser (FEL) to produce a high power tunable laser beam. The paper treats the FEL in a manner which has been used by accelerator physicists to treat the acceleration of charged particles with radio frequency accelerating systems. This allows the ideas that have been developed for the acceleration of charged particles to be used in the design of the wiggler magnet used for the FEL. The emphasis of the paper is mainly tutorial so that the derivation of the equations are presented in a physically intuitive fashion rather than in a strictly rigorous manner. This type of treatment displays in a rather graphic way how the variation of the magnetic wiggler field and wave length affects the coupling of the electron energy to the optical laser beam. We will find that by proper variation of the wiggler parameters, it is possible to obtain a tremendous improvement in the performance of a variable parameter wiggler over the constant parameter wiggler.

• Research Organization: Stanford Linear Accelerator Center, CA (USA)
• DOE Contract Number: EY-76-C-03-0515
• OSTI ID: 6056719
• Report Number(s): SLAC-PUB-2371; CONF-790853-1
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

Related Subjects

42 ENGINEERING
420300* -- Engineering-- Lasers-- (-1989)
FREE ELECTRON LASERS
LASERS
MATHEMATICAL MODELS
TUNING