This report presents the conceptual design of a new European research infrastructure EuPRAXIA. The concept has been established over the last four years in a unique collaboration of 41 laboratories within a Horizon 2020 design study funded by the European Union. EuPRAXIA is the first European project that develops a dedicated particle accelerator research infrastructure based on novel plasma acceleration concepts and laser technology. It focuses on the development of electron accelerators and underlying technologies, their user communities, and the exploitation of existing accelerator infrastructures in Europe. EuPRAXIA has involved, amongst others, the international laser community and industry to build links and bridges with accelerator science — through realising synergies, identifying disruptive ideas, innovating, and fostering knowledge exchange. The Eu-PRAXIA project aims at the construction of an innovative electron accelerator using laser- and electron-beam-driven plasma wakefield acceleration that offers a significant reduction in size and possible savings in cost over current state-of-the-art radiofrequency-based accelerators. The foreseen electron energy range of one to five gigaelectronvolts (GeV) and its performance goals will enable versatile applications in various domains, e.g. as a compact free-electron laser (FEL), compact sources for medical imaging and positron generation, table-top test beams for particle detectors, as well as deeply penetrating X-ray and gamma-ray sources for material testing. EuPRAXIA is designed to be the required stepping stone to possible future plasma-based facilities, such as linear colliders at the high-energy physics (HEP) energy frontier. Consistent with a high-confidence approach, the project includes measures to retire risk by establishing scaled technology demonstrators. This report includes preliminary models for project implementation, cost and schedule that would allow operation of the full Eu-PRAXIA facility within 8—10 years.

EuPRAXIA Conceptual Design Report

The Project Sorgente Pulsata e Amplificata di Radiazione Coerente (SPARC), proposed by a collaboration among ENEA–INFN–CNR–Universita’ di Tor Vergata–INFM–ST, was recently approved by the Italian Government and will be built at LNF. The aim of the project is to promote an R&D activity oriented to the development of a coherent ultra-brilliant X-ray source in Italy. This collaboration has identified a program founded on two main issues: the generation of ultra-high peak brightness electron beams and of resonant higher harmonics in the SASE-FEL process, as presented in this paper.

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The SPARC project: a High brightness electron beam source at LNF to drive a SASE-FEL experiment

Photo-injectors beam physics remains a fruitful and exciting field of research. New ideas have been recently proposed to achieve ultra-high brightness beams, as particularly needed in SASE-FEL experiments, and to produce flat beams as required in linear colliders. An overview of recent advancements in photo-injector beam physics is reported in this paper.

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Recent Advances and Novel Ideas for High Brightness Electron Beam Production Based on Photo-Injectors

The Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) is a single pass X-ray FEL designed to produce very short (∼200 fs) and very high power (8 GW), short wavelength (1.5 A) pulses. The new facility to be built at SLAC as a multiple laboratory collaboration will have peak brilliance performance exceeding those obtained presently in third generation synchrotron radiation sources by 10 orders of magnitude. In this paper, we review the accelerator physics design challenges. We report on advances made in photo-injectors. We discuss the issues of Coherent Synchrotron Radiation produced in the bunch compressors and undulator vacuum chamber wakefields.

Design considerations for the LCLS

After three years of preparation, two superstructures, each made of two superconducting 7-cell weakly coupled subunits, have been installed in the TESLA Test Facility linac (TTF) for the cold- and beam test. The energy stability, the HOMs damping, the frequency and the field adjustment methods were tested. The measured results confirmed expectation on the superstructure performance and proved that alternative layout for the 800 GeV upgrade of the TESLA collider, as it was proposed in TDR, is feasible. We report on the test and give here an overview of its results which are commented in more detail elsewhere in these Proceedings.

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Cold- and beam test of the first prototypes of the superstructure for the TESLA collider

A great deal of international interest has recently focused on the design and construction of free-electron lasers (FEL) operating in the x-ray region ({approx}1 {angstrom}). At present, a linac-based machine utilizing the principle of self-amplified spontaneous emission (SASE) appears to be the most promising approach. This new class of FEL achieves lasing in a single pass of a high brightness electron beam through a long undulator. The requirements on electron beam quality become more demanding as the FEL radiation wavelength decreases, with the 1-{angstrom} goal still 3-orders of magnitude below the shortest wavelength operational SASE FEL (TTF-FEL at DESY [1]). The subpicosecond bunch length drives damaging effects such as coherent synchrotron radiation, and undulator vacuum chamber wakefields. Unlike linear colliders, beam brightness needs to be maintained only over a small ''slice'' of the bunch length, so the concepts of bunch integrated emittance and energy spread are less relevant than their high-frequency (or ''time-sliced'') counterparts, also adding a challenge to phase space diagnostics. Some of the challenges associated with the generation, preservation, measurement, and stability of high brightness FEL electron beams are discussed here.

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Paul J Emma

Papers

Accelerator physics challenges of x-ray fel sase sources*