LCLS – Large Laser Infrastructure Development and Local Implications

Abstract

The most powerful now in the world, American Xray laser LCLS (Linac Coherent Light Source), has been working as a research and user facility since 2009. It is further developed to LCLS II machine at the Stanford National Accelerator Laboratory SLAC in Menlo Park CA. In a certain sense, LCLS II is a response to the EXFEL machine and a logical extension of LCLS. All these machines are light sources of the fifth generation. EXFEL is expected to open user facility in 2016, at a cost of over 1 mld Euro. LCLS II, which design started in 2010, will be operational in 2017. The lasers LCLS, LCLS II and EXFEL use SASE and SEED methods to generate light and are powered by electron linacs, LCLS by a warm one, and EXFEL by a cold one. The linacs have energies approaching 20 GeV, and are around 2 - 3 km in length. EXFEL linac uses SRF TESLA microwave cavity technology at 1,3GHz. A prototype of EXFEL was FLASH laser. SLAC Laboratory uses effectively over 50 years experience in research, building and exploitation of linear electron accelerators. In 2009, a part of the largest 3 km SLAC linac was used to build the LCLS machine. For the LCLS II machine a new infrastructure is build for two new laser beams and a number of experimental stations. A number of experts and young researchers from Poland participate in the design, construction and research of the biggest world linear and elliptical accelerators and FEL lasers like LCLS (Stanford), EXFEL (DESY) and CEBAF (JLab), and a few more. The paper concentrates on the development state-of-the-art of large laser infrastructure and its global and local impact, in the competitive world of R&D. LCLS infrastructure implications in Poland are considered.

International Journal of Electronics and Telecommunications

“…The article is a next part in a series of considerations concerning large, mainly accelerator based, research experiments and participation of Polish physics and engineering communities, especially young scientists. The series included papers published internationally on large experiments, infrastructures and projects: ILC [8], LCLS [9], EXFEL [10], CMS/LHC [11], ITER [12], POLFEL [13], plasma acceleration and fifth generation light sources [14], CARE and other European accelerator projects [15][16], TIARA [17], EuCARD [18][19], EuCARD2 [20], ARIES [21][22], CBM at FAIR/GSI [23][24], and other. Some of these publications were written in Polish for outreach purposes to disseminate the large experiment ideas among local physicists and engineers [25].…”

Characterization of x-ray imaging crystal spectrometer for high-resolution spatially-resolved x-ray Thomson scattering measurements in shock-compressed experiments

“…To overcome the problem of source bandwidth we pursued the use of an x-ray free electron laser beam as a probe. The Linac Coherent Light Source [40] at SLAC is an x-ray free electron laser, tunable in the range 800 to 8000 eV with 2×10 12 photons in a 20-200 femtosecond (fs) pulse, which is a suitable facility for this application. In this study, the LCLS beam provides the narrow (ΔE/E < 0.003) line with a bandwidth of ~15 eV at 5.07 keV required for spectrally resolved x-ray scattering, which is desirable for scattering in both non-collective and collective regimes.…”

CBM Experiment Local and Global Implications

“…These experiments have a common denominator: they are of ultimate infrastructural scale, unfortunately they are not located in Poland, they are infrastructures of cutting edge discovery class, in all of them take part young researchers from Poland, and especially from Warsaw University of Technology -WUT, but also AGH Kraków, Wrocław UT, Łódź UT. Previous articles described research infrastructures and experiments in lasers, accelerators, tokamaks [3][4][5][6], like LCLS, FLASH, EXFEL, TESLA, LHC, CMS, TOTEM, JET, ITER and CBM [7]. But first of all, the participation and intellectual input of young researchers from the Institute of Electronic Systems of WUT in all these experiments was emphasized.…”