In Pursuit of an Energy Recovery Linac X-ray Source

K.D. Finkelstein, Staff Scientist, Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS)

Scientists at Cornell University want to build an Energy Recovery Linac (ERL) x-ray source over the next 10 years. The ERL, a 4th generation light source, is neither a free-electron laser nor an "ultimate storage ring". It uses a laser driven photocathode to produce exceeding bright electron pulses, and a superconducting LINAC to accelerate the particle beam and recover energy after a single pass through a series of x-ray undulators*. Unlike a storage ring that stores electron charge, the ERL stores beam energy and this can lead to improved x-ray beam properties because the source is reduced by factors up to 900 in area and 300 in length. The ERL should be an almost diffraction limited hard x-ray source with extremely flexible time structure.

The small electron source makes the ERL ideally suited for x-ray production via long undulators (*magnetic field arrays used to produce small period and amplitude electron oscillations) that produce a spectrum of sharp x-ray harmonics of extremely high angular collimation. We discuss the expected performance of an ERL relative to existing storage rings and show how the ERL is likely to benefit x-ray experimentation from microscopy, through Femtosecond timing studies, to inelastic scattering.

The Cornell ERL website is: http://erl.chess.cornell.edu/ .

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Last modified 29-December-2004 by website owner: NCNR (attn: )