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 µm) 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 backgr...