High-Yield Optical Undulators Scalable to Optical Free-Electron Laser Operation by Traveling-Wave Thomson-Scattering

All across physics research, incoherent and coherent light sources are extensively utilized.
Especially highly brilliant X-ray sources such as third generation synchrotrons or free-electron lasers have become an invaluable tool enabling experimental techniques that are unique to these kinds of light sources.
But these sources have developed to large scale facilities and a demand in compact laboratory scale sources providing radiation of similar quality arises nowadays.

This thesis focuses on Traveling-Wave Thomson-Scattering (TWTS) which allows for the realization of ultra-compact, inherently synchronized and highly brilliant light sources.
The TWTS geometry provides optical undulators, through which electrons pass and thereby emit radiation, with hundreds to thousands of undulator periods by utilizing pulse-front tilted lasers pulses from high peak-power laser systems.

TWTS can realize incoherent radiation sources with orders of magnitude higher photon yield than established head-on Thomson sources.
Moreover, optical free-electron lasers (OFELs) can be realized with TWTS if state-of-the-art technology in electron accelerators and laser systems is utilized.

Tilting the laser pulse front with respect to the wavefront by half of this interaction angle optimizes electron and laser pulse overlap by compensating the spatial offset between electrons and the laser pulse-front at the beginning of the interaction when the electrons are far from the laser pulse axis. The laser pulse-front tilt ensures continuous overlap between electrons and laser pulse while the electrons cross the laser pulse cross-sectional area. Thus the interaction distance can be controlled in TWTS by the laser pulse width rather than laser pulse duration. Utilizing wide, petawatt class laser pulses allows realizing thousands of optical undulator periods.

This thesis will show that TWTS OFELs emitting ultraviolet radiation are realizable today with existing technology for electron accelerators and laser systems.
The requirements on electron bunch and laser pulse quality of these ultraviolet TWTS OFELs are discussed in detail as well as the corresponding requirements of TWTS OFELs emitting in the soft and hard X-ray range.
These requirements are derived from scaling laws which stem from a self-consistent analytic description of the electron bunch and radiation field dynamics in TWTS OFELs presented within this thesis.
It is shown that these dynamics in TWTS OFELs are qualitatively equivalent to the electron bunch and radiation field dynamics of standard free-electron lasers which analytically proves the applicability of TWTS for the realization of an optical free-electron laser.

Furthermore, experimental setup strategies to generate the pulse-front tilted TWTS laser pulses are presented and designs of experimental setups for the above examples are discussed.
The presented setup strategies provide dispersion compensation, required due to angular dispersion of the laser pulse, which is especially relevant when building compact, high-yield hard X-ray TWTS sources in large interaction angle setups.
An example of such an enhanced Thomson source by TWTS, which provides orders of magnitude higher spectral photon density than a comparable head-on interaction geometry, is presented, too.