SLAC’s LCLS-II is advancing towards MHz repetition rate attosecond X-ray pulses, creating opportunities to optimize X-ray generation through machine-driven controls and diagnostics via start-to-end simulation. Advanced laser shaping and upconversion techniques at the photoinjector, such as spatial light modulator-based pre-amplifier pulse shaping linked to nonlinear methods such as dispersion-controlled nonlinear synthesis or four-wave mixing, enable precise electron bunch control at the source. Downstream, diagnostics like the Multi-Resolution COokiebox (MRCO)—a 16-channel time-of-flight spectrometer—characterize X-ray pulse profiles, providing real-time feedback on attosecond X-ray pulses or attosecond X-ray substructure. We present developments towards a framework linking programmable photoinjector laser shaping to X-ray diagnostics, enabling data-driven optimization of the X-ray source. This approach combines machine learning, high-throughput feedback, and advanced control to align LCLS-II capabilities with experimental goals, laying the foundation for optimization of attosecond-scale precision in X-ray experiments.

In this Letter, we present a robust method for generating custom-shaped, coherent hard x-ray pulses in regenerative amplifier free-electron lasers (RAFELs) using laser-induced energy modulation of the electron beam. A temporally shaped optical modulation imprints an optical-wavelength energy pattern on the beam, which interacts with the recirculated seed in the x-ray cavity to generate spectral sidebands. These sidebands lie outside the Bragg reflection bandwidth and are extracted as out-coupled radiation, while the seed is retained for continued amplification, enabling a novel mechanism for both output coupling and pulse shaping. This approach allows deterministic control over the spectral and temporal properties of the emitted x-rays, including multicolor generation, twin-pulse structures, pulse duration tuning, and complex temporal waveforms. Importantly, it does not require modification of the RAFEL cavity or optics and is fully compatible with high-repetition-rate operation, offering a practical pathway to deliver coherent, shaped, and on-demand x-ray pulses for advanced time-resolved and nonlinear x-ray science.

Poincar & eacute; beams are light beams that have spatially inhomogeneous polarization structure that spans a finite portion of the Poincar & eacute; sphere. This feature bestows the beams with intriguing topological properties and has led to a surge in research on their fundamental characteristics, their controlled generation and on emerging applications. Here we present an experimental demonstration of a Poincar & eacute; beam generated in the extreme ultraviolet (16.7 nm) at the FERMI free electron laser (FEL). The 'star' type Poincar & eacute; beam is generated by exploiting the phase and intensity structure intrinsic to FEL radiation without relying on optical elements. We controlled the spatial polarization distribution through a precise overlap and power balance between two FEL pulses, each with different transverse phase distributions and orthogonal circular polarizations. The spatial polarization structure was mapped in detail and shows extensive coverage of the Poincar & eacute; sphere, in agreement with analytic predictions. This method of in situ Poincar & eacute; beam production in FELs enables straightforward flexibility in the orientation and balance of polarization states, and can readily be extended to other vector beams and to shorter wavelengths enabling novel science applications in modern light sources.

Despite tremendous progress in x-ray free-electron laser (FEL) science over the last decade, future applications still demand fully coherent, stable x rays that have not been demonstrated in existing x-ray FEL facilities. In this Letter, we describe an active Q-switched x-ray regenerative amplifier FEL scheme to produce fully coherent, high-brightness, hard x rays at a high-repetition rate. By using simple electron-beam phase space manipulation, we show this scheme is flexible in controlling the x-ray cavity quality factor Q and hence the output radiation. We report both theoretical and numerical studies on this scheme with a wide range of accelerator, x-ray cavity, and undulator parameters.

We demonstrate the generation of extreme-ultraviolet (XUV) free-electron laser (FEL) pulses with time-dependent polarization. To achieve polarization modulation on a femtosecond timescale, we combine two mutually delayed counterrotating circularly polarized subpulses from two cross-polarized undulators. The polarization profile of the pulses is probed by angle-resolved photoemission and above-threshold ionization of helium; the results agree with solutions of the time-dependent Schrödinger equation. The stability limit of the scheme is mainly set by electron-beam energy fluctuations, however, at a level that will not compromise experiments in the XUV. Our results demonstrate the potential to improve the resolution and element selectivity of methods based on polarization shaping and may lead to the development of new coherent control schemes for probing and manipulating core electrons in matter.

Electron beam quality is paramount for X-ray pulse production in free-electron-lasers (FELs). State-of-the-art linear accelerators (linacs) can deliver multi-GeV electron beams with sufficient quality for hard X-ray-FELs, albeit requiring km-scale setups, whereas plasma-based accelerators can produce multi-GeV electron beams on metre-scale distances, and begin to reach beam qualities sufficient for EUV FELs. We show, that electron beams from plasma photocathodes many orders of magnitude brighter than state-of-the-art can be generated in plasma wakefieldaccelerators (PWFA), and then extracted, captured, transported and injected into undulators without quality loss. These ultrabright, sub-femtosecond electron beams can drive hard X-FELs near the cold beam limit to generate coherent X-ray pulses of attosecond-Angstrom class, reaching saturation after only 10 metres of undulator. This plasma-X-FEL opens pathways for novel photon science capabilities, such as unperturbed observation of electronic motion inside atoms at their natural time and length scale, and towards higher photon energies.

We describe a new method to produce intensity stable, highly coherent, narrow-band x-ray pulses in self-seeded free electron (FEL) lasers. The approach uses an ultrashort electron beam to generate a single spike FEL pulse with a wide coherent bandwidth. The self-seeding monochromator then notches out a narrow spectral region of this pulse to be amplified by a long portion of electron beam to full saturation. In contrast to typical self-seeding where monochromatization of noisy self-amplified spontaneous emission pulses leads to either large intensity fluctuations or multiple frequencies, we show that this method produces a stable, coherent FEL output pulse with statistical properties similar to a fully coherent optical laser.

We describe a method for producing high power, coherent x-ray pulses from a free electron laser with femtosecond scale periodic temporal modulation of the polarization vector. This approach relies on the generation of a temporal intensity modulation after self seeding either by modulating the seed intensity or the beam current. After generating a coherent temporally modulated s-polarization pulse, the electron beam is delayed by half a modulation period and sent into a short orthogonally oriented undulator, serving as a p-polarization afterburner. We provide simulations of three configurations for realizing this polarization switching, namely, enhanced self seeding with an intensity modulation generated by 2 color self seeding, enhanced self seeding of a current modulated bunch, and regular self seeding of a current modulated bunch. Start to end simulations for the Linac Coherent Light Source-II are provided for the latter.

An optics-free method is proposed to generate x-ray radiation with spatially variant states of polarization via an afterburner extension to a free electron laser. Control of the polarization in the transverse plane is obtained through the overlap of different coherent transverse light distributions radiated from a bunched electron beam in two consecutive orthogonally polarised undulators. Different transverse profiles are obtained by emitting at a higher harmonic in one or both of the undulators. This method enables the generation of beams structured in their intensity, phase, and polarization—so-called Poincaré beams—at high powers with tunable wavelengths. Simulations are used to demonstrate the generation of two different classes of light with spatially inhomogeneous polarization—cylindrical vector beams and full Poincaré beams.

We study the impact of a spectral noise pedestal on the statistical properties of a self-seeded free electron laser (FEL). The broad pedestal is assumed to come from self amplified spontaneous emission (SASE) in the second stage of the self-seeding system and is uncorrelated with the narrowband amplified seed. An analytic description is developed based on the statistical theory of a one-dimensional FEL in the high gain linear regime. The theory shows good agreement with experimental data, which show that the presence of a SASE background can have a strong impact on the statistical behavior of self-seeding systems.

We analytically examine several important characteristics of coherent radiation emitted from a relativistic electron beam in a helical undulator. The goal is to highlight specific attributes relevant to the production of bright x-rays with angular momentum in a free-electron laser (FEL) afterburner. The far-field complex electric field distribution is derived, and for small forward emission angles, it is confirmed that the spin and orbital components of angular momentum in the radiation are separable, additive, and aligned with the handedness of the electron motion. The coherent energy radiated at harmonics h from a bunched electron beam is then calculated, and used to evaluate the emission energy from a FEL afterburner configuration. Results show that an afterburner undulator with N-u >> 1 periods and of sufficient strength will produce harmonic pulses with energy similar to 1/N-u(h-1) times that of the fundamental, depending on the Fresnel number N = k sigma(2)(x)/L-u of the radiating electron beam.

Self-seeding is one of the most promising methods to improve the longitudinal coherence and spectral purity of free-electron lasers (FELs). Measurements of the multishot-averaged, soft x-ray self-seeding spectrum at the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) FEL often have a pedestal-like distribution around the seeded wavelength. In this paper, a theoretical model based on the mechanism of spectral sideband generation is developed to explain the statistical behavior of the seed and pedestal. The model is in good agreement with statistical analysis of numerical FEL simulations and experimental measurements that show that pedestal fluctuations reflect the level of long-wavelength microbunching structures in the beam, and are driven by fluctuations of the seed.

It is shown that Jacobi elliptic function solutions of the nonlinear Duffing equation model the radiation field in a high-gain free electron laser through early saturation. After initial start-up, the field can be expressed equivalently with a hyperbolic secant. The model is derived for arbitrary detuning from resonance, which enables study of the spectral properties in the early nonlinear regime.

We exploit echo-enabled harmonic generation (EEHG) to produce fully coherent free-electron laser (FEL) pulses at soft-x-ray wavelengths and shape their spectrotemporal content. In an EEHG FEL, the longitudinal phase space of the relativistic electron beam that amplifies light is precisely tailored using two external seed lasers and two magnetic chicanes. We show that the spectrotemporal properties of the emitted radiation can be controlled by tuning the bandwidth, linear frequency chirp, and intensity of one of the seed lasers. The experimental data are supported by analytical and numerical models. Our results open a pathway toward coherent control of quantum processes at short wavelengths in the fields of applied physics, chemistry and biology, where manipulating the radiation spectrum is essential. The ability to precisely control the spectrotemporal content of intense, short-wavelength FEL pulses and the low sensitivity of the radiation to electron-beam imperfections make the technique an ideal candidate for use in chirped-pulse amplification schemes.

Measurements of the soft x-ray, self-seeding spectrum at the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) free-electron laser generally display a pedestal-like distribution around the central seeded wavelength. This pedestal limits the spectral purity and can negatively affect some user applications not employing a post-undulator monochromator. In this paper, we investigate the detailed experimental characteristics of both the amplified seed and its accompanying pedestal using data from a number of separate LCLS shifts over the 2015-2018 time period. We find that the amplified seed shows excellent wavelength stability and an exponential growth rate whose dependence upon energy detuning is consistent with theory. The pedestal's spectral distribution and integrated strength vary strongly shot by shot, independent of electron beam energy jitter. Its shot-averaged strength relative to that of the seed grows at least linearly with z and can approach values of 15% or more. The pedestal is comprised of two separate components: (1) normal self-amplified spontaneous emission (SASE) whose total strength is nominally insensitive to energy detuning and laser heater (LH) strength; (2) sideband-like emission whose strength positively correlates with that of the amplified seed and negatively with energy detuning and LH strength. We believe this latter, non-SASE component arises from comparatively long wavelength (i.e., lambda similar to 0.3-3 mu m) amplitude and phase modulations of the main seeded radiation line. Its shot to shot variability and LH sensitivity suggests an origin connected to growth of the longitudinal microbunching instability on the electron beam.

We report on the successful operation of a Free Electron Laser (FEL) in the Echo Enabled Harmonic Generation (EEHG) scheme at the FERMI facility at Sincrotrone Trieste. The experiment required a modification of the FEL-2 undulator line which, in normal operation, uses two stages of high-gain harmonic generation separated by a delay line. In addition to a new seed laser, the dispersion in the delay-line was increased, the second stage modulator changed and a new manipulator installed in the delay-line chicane hosting additional diagnostic components. With this modified setup we have demonstrated the first evidence of strong exponential gain in a free electron laser operated in EEHG mode at wavelengths as short as 5 nm.