This article appeared in a journal published by Elsevier. The attached copy is furnished to the author for internal non-commercial research and education use, including for instruction at the authors institution and sharing with colleagues.Other uses, including reproduction and distribution, or selling or licensing copies, or posting to personal, institutional or third party websites are prohibited. t r a c tA new facility named SPARC_LAB has been recently launched at the INFN National Laboratories in Frascati, merging the potentialities of the former projects SPARC and PLASMONX. We describe in this paper the status and the future perspectives at the SPARC_LAB facility.

This report presents the conceptual design of a new European research infrastructure EuPRAXIA. The concept has been established over the last four years in a unique collaboration of 41 laboratories within a Horizon 2020 design study funded by the European Union. EuPRAXIA is the first European project that develops a dedicated particle accelerator research infrastructure based on novel plasma acceleration concepts and laser technology. It focuses on the development of electron accelerators and underlying technologies, their user communities, and the exploitation of existing accelerator infrastructures in Europe. EuPRAXIA has involved, amongst others, the international laser community and industry to build links and bridges with accelerator science — through realising synergies, identifying disruptive ideas, innovating, and fostering knowledge exchange. The Eu-PRAXIA project aims at the construction of an innovative electron accelerator using laser- and electron-beam-driven plasma wakefield acceleration that offers a significant reduction in size and possible savings in cost over current state-of-the-art radiofrequency-based accelerators. The foreseen electron energy range of one to five gigaelectronvolts (GeV) and its performance goals will enable versatile applications in various domains, e.g. as a compact free-electron laser (FEL), compact sources for medical imaging and positron generation, table-top test beams for particle detectors, as well as deeply penetrating X-ray and gamma-ray sources for material testing. EuPRAXIA is designed to be the required stepping stone to possible future plasma-based facilities, such as linear colliders at the high-energy physics (HEP) energy frontier. Consistent with a high-confidence approach, the project includes measures to retire risk by establishing scaled technology demonstrators. This report includes preliminary models for project implementation, cost and schedule that would allow operation of the full Eu-PRAXIA facility within 8—10 years.

We present the experimental demonstration of a new scheme for the generation of ultrashort pulse trains based on free-electron-laser (FEL) emission from a multipeaked electron energy distribution. Two electron beamlets with energy difference larger than the FEL parameter have been generated by illuminating the cathode with two ps-spaced laser pulses, followed by a rotation of the longitudinal phase space by velocity bunching in the linac. The resulting self-amplified spontaneous emission FEL radiation, measured through frequency-resolved optical gating diagnostics, reveals a double-peaked spectrum and a temporally modulated pulse structure. DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.111.114802 PACS numbers: 41.60.Cr, 42.55.Àf, 42.65.Ky Radiation pulses with attosecond to femtosecond time scales represent a real possibility for a breakthrough in science and technology, permitting unprecedented insights into the ultrafast electron and nuclear dynamics [1][2][3]. The time-resolved study of electron rearrangements could lead to significant advances in the understanding of intermolecular processes, chemical bond breaking and formation, and the interaction of photoactivated molecules with their environment.Trains of ultrashort radiation pulses enable stroboscopic electron imaging [4] and the investigation of the response accompanying collective electron motion in nanomaterials [5]. They also find further applications in other technical fields, such as the enhancement of transmission or reflectivity in materials, resonant inelastic x-ray scattering, or the ab initio phasing of nanocrystals [6].Sequences of spikes have been synthesized by means of the high harmonic generation driven by lasers in gases [7] and regularly used in experiments [4,8], but are severely limited in efficiency approaching the keV range.Free-electron lasers (FELs) are capable of producing high brightness pulses in the x-ray spectral region [9][10][11][12]. The FEL, in the self-amplified spontaneous emission (SASE) mode of operation [13], generates radiation with limited temporal coherence [14], time duration of the order of the electron bunch length and structured in a chaotic succession of random peaks. The typical time scale of these radiation spikes is set by the FEL Pierce parameter [13]. Several techniques have been explored to increase longitudinal coherence, stability, and/or to shorten the FEL pulse time scale towards the attosecond domain. The amplification of one single SASE spike has been demonstrated by compressing the electron beam close or below the FEL coherence length [15,16], by using a chirped bunch energy combined with a matched undulator taper [17][18][19], or by spoiling the whole electron beam except a limited fraction [20,21], a technique that has also been implemented to produce double pulse two-color radiation for pump and probe experiments [22]. Short single or multiple pulses have also been produced in seeded or cascaded FELs [23][24][25][26][27], with increased coherence and shot to shot stability. More sophisticated seeding concept...

The injection of a seed in a free-electron laser (FEL) amplifier reduces the saturation length and improves the longitudinal coherence. A cascaded FEL, operating in the high-gain harmonic-generation regime, allows us to extend the beneficial effects of the seed to shorter wavelengths. We report on the first operation of a high-gain harmonic-generation free-electron laser, seeded with harmonics generated in gas. The third harmonics of a Ti:sapphire laser, generated in a gas cell, has been amplified and up-converted to its second harmonic (λ(rad)=133 nm) in a FEL cascaded configuration based on a variable number of modulators and radiators. We studied the transition between coherent harmonic generation and superradiant regime, optimizing the laser performances with respect to the number of modulators and radiators.

We report the first experimental implementation of a method based on simultaneous use of an energy chirp in the electron beam and a tapered undulator, for the generation of ultrashort pulses in a selfamplified spontaneous emission mode free-electron laser (SASE FEL). The experiment, performed at the SPARC FEL test facility, demonstrates the possibility of compensating the nominally detrimental effect of the chirp by a proper taper of the undulator gaps. An increase of more than 1 order of magnitude in the pulse energy is observed in comparison to the untapered case, accompanied by FEL spectra where the typical SASE spiking is suppressed.