We present the results from studies of soft x-ray seeding options for the LCLS–II x-ray free electron laser (FEL) at SLAC. The LCLS-II will use superconducting accelerator technology to produce x-ray pulses at up to 1 MHz repetition rate using 4 GeV electron beams. If properly seeded, these pulses will be nearly fully coherent, and highly stable in photon energy, bandwidth, and intensity, thus enabling unique experiments with intense high-resolution soft x-rays. Given the expected electron beam parameters from start to end simulations and predicted FEL performance, our studies reveal echo enabled harmonic generation (EEHG) and soft x-ray self-seeding (SXRSS) as promising and complementary seeding methods. We find that SXRSS has the advantage of simplicity and will deliver 5-35 times higher spectral brightness than EEHG in the 1–2 nm range, but lacks some of the potential for phase-stable multipulse and multicolor FEL operations enabled by external laser seeding with EEHG.

• Received 18 July 2019

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevAccelBeams.22.110701

Published by the American Physical Society under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Further distribution of this work must maintain attribution to the author(s) and the published article’s title, journal citation, and DOI.

Published by the American Physical Society