Laser Assisted Emittance Transfer for Storage Ring Lasing

In modern storage rings the transverse emittance of electron beams can be comparable to that from state-of-art photoinjectors, but the intrinsic low peak current and large energy spread pre-cludes the possibility of realizing short-wavelength high-gain free electron lasers (FELs) in storage rings. In this note I propose a technique to significantly increase beam peak current without greatly increasing beam energy spread, which is achieved by transferring part of the longitudinal emittance to transverse plane. It is shown that by properly repartitioning the emittance in 6-D phase space, the beam from a large storage ring may be used to drive a single-pass high-gain FEL in soft x-ray wavelength range.