Microbunch Instability Theory and Simulations

Over the last years there have been several reports of quasiperiodic bursts of coherent synchrotron radiation (CSR) in electron rings in the microwave and far-infrared range. The observations were made on synchrotron radiation light sources which include the Synchrotron Ultraviolet Radiation Facility SURF II [1], the VUV ring at the National Synchrotron Light Source at BNL [2, 3], second generation light sources MAX-I [4], BESSY II [5], and ALS [6]. General features of those observations can be summarized as follows. Above a threshold current, there is a strongly increased radiation of the beam in the range of wavelengths shorter than the bunch length, λ < σ2. At large currents, this radiation is observed as a sequence of random bursts. In the bursting regime, intensity of the radiation scales approximately as square of the number of particles in the bunch, indicating a coherent nature of the phenomenon. It is generally accepted that the source of this radiation is related to the microbunching of the beam arising from development of a microwave instability caused by the coherent synchrotron radiation of the beam. A relativistic electron beam moving in a circular orbit in free space can radiate coherently if the wavelength of the synchrotron radiation exceeds the length of the bunch. In accelerators coherent radiation of the bunch is usually suppressed by the shielding effect of the conducting walls of the vacuum chamber [7-9], which gives an exponential cutoff of wavelengths greater than a certain threshold. However, an initial density fluctuation with a characteristic length much shorter than the shielding threshold would radiate coherently. If the radiation reaction force is such that it results in the growth of the initial fluctuation one can expect an instability that leads to micro-bunching of the beam and an increased coherent radiation at short wavelengths. A possibility of CSR instability was pointed out in Refs. [10, 11]