Abstract

For the past three years, a multidisciplinary team of Los Alamos scientists, supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, has been developing the requisite technologies to extend free-electron laser (FEL) operation from infrared and visible wavelengths into the extreme-ultraviolet below 100 nm using rf-linear accelerator technology. The goal is to establish an XUV Free-Electron Laser User Facility, the next-generation light source that will make available to researchers optical power more than one-million times greater than provided by synchrotron light sources. Based primarily on a series of FEL oscillators driven by a single, rf-linac, the Los Alamos facility is designed to generate broadly tunable, picosecond-pulse, coherent radiation spanning the soft x-ray through the ultraviolet to the visible spectral ranges from 1 nm to 400 nm.

© 1988 Optical Society of America