This international workshop was held at the Thomas Jefferson Nation Lab in the USA and discussed the technologies appropriate for a next phase of photon user facilities providing high peak and average photon brightness. ASTeC staff made a made a major contribution to the workshop as outlined below.
On the first day of the workshop Mark Roper gave an invited plenary presentation on Soft X-ray Optics and Beamlines for Next Generation Light Sources. Susan Smith was co-convenor of the working group sessions on ERLs and presented an overview of the ALICE activities and Deepa Angal-Kalinin presented more details of the sophisticated beam dynamics simulations which are being benched marked against the actual ALICE accelerator within the ERL sessions. Steve Jamison was co-convenor of the Timing and Diagnostics working group and contributed a talk outlining the Challenges in Pushing Electro--Optic Longitudinal Diagnostics to 20 fs. Jim Clarke was able to use our experience of ERL designs to lead in a debate on the limits to recirculation, particularly pointing out issues caused by operating long undulator within a VUV ERL facility. Dave Dunning presented our ideas for CLARA, an FEL test facility and was congratulated by the working group coordinator on his work to produce a spreadsheet collating FEL test facilitates characteristics throughout the World. Mark Roper also participated in this work group outlining the systematic studies carried out towards the design of the ALICE FEL beam line and generated extensive interest in the state of the art wave front propagation codes used in the process. Boris Militsyn participated within a series of lively injector sessions and outlined the Daresbury programme towards an injector for CLARA, including the metal photo injector research programme. This is a new programme at Daresbury aimed towards the production of the short pulses required to drive the CLARA test facility and pushing the boundaries of performance of future light source facilities.
This year, although FELs played a significant role in the workshop, it was clear that the opportunities to consider utilising ex-HEP accelerator tunnels within the USA to deliver the” ultimate storage ring for x-rays” has raised the profile of storage rings as a strong driver of “future light sources” within this series.
The host laboratory was buzzing with the JLAB IR FEL lasing for the first time after a shutdown, the prospect of restarting operations of their unique VUV FEL and plans for their forthcoming injector and RF upgrade.
The programme for the workshop and the invited and contributed talks can be found at the web site (link opens in a new window).
