Observations of strongly enhanced optical transition radiation (OTR) following significant bunch compression of photoinjector beams by a chicane have been reported during the commissioning of the Linac Coherent Light Source accelerator and recently at the Advanced Photon Source (APS) linac. These localized transverse spatial features involve signal enhancements of nearly a factor of 10 and 100 in the APS case at the 150-MeV and 375-MeV OTR stations, respectively. They are consistent with a coherent process seeded by noise and may be evidence of a longitudinal space charge microbunching instability which leads to coherent OTR emissions. Additionally, we suggest that localized transverse structure in the previous self-amplified spontaneous emission (SASE) free-electron laser (FEL) data at APS in the visible regime as reported at FEL02 may be attributed to such beam structure entering the FEL undulators and inducing the SASE startup at those “prebunched” structures. Separate beam structures 120 microns apart in $x$ and 2.9 nm apart in wavelength were reported. The details of these observations and operational parameters will be presented.

• Received 22 December 2008
• Corrected 19 May 2009

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevSTAB.12.040704

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