A Tapered-Undulator Experiment at the ELBE FIR Oscillator FEL

A tapered undulator experiment was carried out at the Forschungszentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (ELBE) far-infrared FEL. The main motivation was to see whether the presence of a dispersive medium due to the partially waveguided resonator has any effect on the outcome. The FEL saturated power and the wavelength shifts have been measured as a function of both positive as well as negative undulator field amplitude tapering. In contrast to the typical high-gain FELs where positive tapering (i.e. a decrease of undulator field amplitude over the beam path) proves beneficial for the output power we observe an improvement of performance at negative taper. During the same experiments we studied the characteristics of the detuning curves. The width of the curves indicates a maximum small-signal gain for zero taper while the output peak power is highest for negative taper. Whereas the saturated power output and the detuning curve characteristics agree with the known theoretical predictions, the wavelength shifts showed deviations from the expected values. Details of the experiment are presented.