Transverse-to-Longitudinal Emittance Exchange to Improve Performance of High-Gain Free-Electron Lasers

The ability to generate small transverse emittance is perhaps the main limiting factor for the performance of high-gain x-rays free-electron lasers (FELs). Noting that beams from an rf photocathode gun can have energy spread much smaller than required for efficient FEL interaction, we present a method to produce normalized transverse emittance at or below about 0.1 (micro)m, which will lead to a significantly shorter length undulator as well as a lower electron beam energy for an x-ray FEL project. The beam manipulation consists of producing an unequal partition of the initially equal emittances into two dissimilar emittances by a flat beam technique and exchanging the larger transverse emittance with a small longitudinal emittance. We study various issues involved in the manipulation. In particular, a new emittance exchange optics we found enables an exact emittance exchange necessary for this scheme