A two-color dual-oscillator infrared free-electron laser
Abstract
We report on the design and performance of a two-color dual-oscillator infrared free-electron laser (FEL). The mid-infrared (MIR) FEL at the Fritz Haber Institute (FHI FEL) has been upgraded to include a second oscillator FEL beamline that permits lasing in the far-infrared (FIR) regime from 4.5 {\mu}m to 175 {\mu}m. In addition, a 500 MHz kicker cavity has been installed downstream of the electron accelerator. It allows to deflect electron bunches of up to 50 MeV energy alternately left and right by an angle of {\pm}2{\deg}. It can, thus, split the high-repetition-rate (1 GHz) electron bunch train from the accelerator into two bunch trains of 500 MHz repetition rate each; one is steered to the MIR FEL and the other one to the new FIR FEL. In this two-color mode of simultaneous, synchronized operation the wavelengths in both FELs can be tuned independently over wide ranges of up to a factor of four each by undulator-gap variation. In addition, two-color operation is also available at reduced repetition rates (e.g. 55.6 MHz of both MIR and FIR pulses), as needed for some applications. This unique two-color mode opens up a wealth of novel user applications such as, MIR-FIR pump-probe experiments.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2604.16189,
title = {A two-color dual-oscillator infrared free-electron laser},
author = {Wieland Schöllkopf and Sandy Gewinner and Marco De Pas and Heinz Junkes and Sebastian Kray and William Kirstaedter and William B. Colson and David H. Dowell and Stephen C. Gottschalk and John W. Rathke and Tom J. Schultheiss and Alan M. M. Todd and Lloyd M. Young and Akash Chandra Behera and América Y. Torres-Boy and Martin Wolf and Alexander Paarmann and Gert von Helden and Gerard Meijer},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.16189},
year = {2026}
}