Physical design of a wavelength tunable fully coherent VUV source using a self-seeding free electron laser

In order to meet the requirements of the synchrotron radiation users, a fully coherent VUV free electron laser (FEL) has been preliminarily designed. One important goal of this design is that the radiation wavelength can be easily tuned in a broad range (70-170 nm). In the light of the users' demand and our actual conditions, the self-seeding scheme is adopted for this proposal. Firstly, we attempted to fix the electron energy and only changed the undulator gap to vary the radiation wavelength; however, our analysis implies that this is difficult because of the great difference of the power gain length and FEL efficiency at different wavelengths. Therefore, we have considered dividing the wavelength range into three subareas. In each subarea, a constant electron energy is used and the wavelength tuning is realized only by adjusting the undulator gap. The simulation results show that this scheme has an acceptable performance. (authors)