FERMI&Elettra Accelerator Technical Optimization FinalReport

This report describes the accelerator physics aspects, theengineering considerations and the choice of parameters that led to theaccelerator design of the FERMI Free-Electron-Laser. The accelerator(also called the "electron beam delivery system") covers the region fromthe exit of the injector to the entrance of the first FEL undulator. Theconsiderations that led to the proposed configuration were made on thebasis of a study that explored various options and performance limits.This work follows previous studies of x-ray FEL facilities (SLAC LCLS[1], DESY XFEL [2], PAL XFEL [3], MIT [4], BESSY FEL[5], LBNL LUX [6],Daresbury 4GLS [7]) and integrates many of the ideas that were developedthere. Several issues specific to harmonic cascade FELs, and that had notyet been comprehensively studied, were also encountered and tackled. Aparticularly difficult issue was the need to meet the requirement forhigh peak current and small slice energy spread, as the specification forthe ratio of these two parameters (that defines the peak brightness ofthe electron beam) is almost a factor of two higher than that of theLCLS's SASE FEL. Another challenging aspect was the demand to produce anelectron beam with as uniform as possible peak current and energydistributions along the bunch, a condition that was met by introducingnovel beam dynamics techniques. Part of the challenge was due to the factthat there were no readily available computational tools to carry outreliable calculations, and these had to be developed. Most of theinformation reported in this study is available in the form of scientificpublications, and is partly reproduced here for the convenience of thereader