SwissFEL has a unique capability, among the normal conducting linac-based light sources, to simultaneously serve two separate undulator lines (Aramis and Athos) up to the machine repetition rate of 100 Hz using the double bunch operation mode. It increases twice the experiments throughput of the facility with modest additional investment. Two electron bunches spaced 28 ns apart are extracted from the cathode by two laser pulses with individually controlled repetition rates. The bunches are accelerated up to about 3 GeV in the main linac using the same rf macropulse. After separation, one bunch serves the Athos soft x-ray beamline and the other is further accelerated to serve the hard x-ray beamline - Aramis. A fast and high-stability beam kicker separates the two bunches without disturbing the electron beam and consequently the x-ray lasing. The timing and control system sets hybrid machine modes utilizing independent operation of the two undulator lines with individually programmed repetition rates. Beam diagnostics and feedback systems have to operate with two closely spaced bunches where the two beams share the same machine path. The low-level rf system manipulates the rf amplitude and phase within a fraction of the rf macropulse to provide decoupling of the acceleration parameters of the first and the second bunch. This manuscript presents measurements that show that the bunch separation does not degrade FEL lasing stability.

We present the first lasing results of SwissFEL, a hard X-ray free-electron laser (FEL) that recently came into operation at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland. SwissFEL is a very stable, compact and cost-effective X-ray FEL facility driven by a low-energy and ultra-low-emittance electron beam travelling through short-period undulators. It delivers stable hard X-ray FEL radiation at 1-Å wavelength with pulse energies of more than 500 μJ, pulse durations of ~30 fs (root mean square) and spectral bandwidth below the per-mil level. Using special configurations, we have produced pulses shorter than 1 fs and, in a different set-up, broadband radiation with an unprecedented bandwidth of ~2%. The extremely small emittance demonstrated at SwissFEL paves the way for even more compact and affordable hard X-ray FELs, potentially boosting the number of facilities worldwide and thereby expanding the population of the scientific community that has access to X-ray FEL radiation.

The SwissFEL X-ray Free Electron Laser (XFEL) facility started construction at the Paul Scherrer Institute (Villigen, Switzerland) in 2013 and will be ready to accept its first users in 2018 on the Aramis hard X-ray branch. In the following sections we will summarize the various aspects of the project, including the design of the soft and hard X-ray branches of the accelerator, the results of SwissFEL performance simulations, details of the photon beamlines and experimental stations, and our first commissioning results.