The cavity-based X-ray free-electron laser (XFEL) has promise in producing fully coherent pulses with a bandwidth of a few meV and very stable intensity, whereas the currently existing self-amplified spontaneous emission (SASE) XFEL is capable of generating ultra-short pulses with chaotic spectra. In general, a cavity-based XFEL can provide a spectral brightness three orders of magnitude higher than that of the SASE mode, thereby opening a new door for cutting-edge scientific research. With the development of superconducting MHz repetition-rate XFEL facilities such as FLASH, European-XFEL, LCLS-II, and SHINE, practical cavity-based XFEL operations are becoming increasingly achievable. In this study, megahertz cavity enhanced X-ray generation (MING) is proposed based on China’s first hard XFEL facility - SHINE, which we refer to as MING@SHINE.

We report the study and demonstration of a new laser pulse shaping system capable of generating linearly polarized picosecond laser pulses with variable temporal profiles including symmetric intensity distributions such as parabolic, flattop, elliptical, triangular, as well as non-symmetric distributions, which are highly desired by various applications. It is found that both high transmittance and high stability of the shaped pulse can be achieved simultaneously when crystals are set at a specific phase delay through fine control of the crystal temperature. Although multi-crystal pulse stacking with different configurations were reported before particularly for flattop pulse generation, this new configuration leads to new opportunities for many potential applications over a wide range of laser wavelengths, pulse repetition rate, time structures and power levels. A practical double-pass temporal shaping configuration that significantly reduces the number of crystals is also proposed in this paper as a result of this work.

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The beam splitter is an optical element that divides a beam of light into two or more subbeams. It is an essential component in many optical experiments. X-ray has the characteristics of short wavelength and strong penetration ability, making it hard to use the optical elements in the visible-light region. Therefore, it is necessary to develop optical elements suitable for X-rays. The atomic layer spacing of the perfect crystal is of the same order of magnitude as the X-ray wavelength, so the crystal diffraction effect can be used to achieve the X-ray modulation. In this paper, the beam splitting characteristics of Laue crystal are analyzed based on X-ray diffraction dynamics and the influences of crystal absorption and incident light angular divergence on the rocking curves of transmission and diffraction are simulated. The modulation of the ratio of the crystal diffraction in-plane angle and crystal thickness to Laue diffraction beam-splitting is presented quantitatively. The results show that the kinematical theory of X-ray diffraction is not enough to analyze the beam splitting characteristics of the crystal. It is necessary to consider the interaction between the wave fields in the crystal and use the Pendellӧsung effect in the dynamical theory of X-ray diffraction to explain the change of the crystal beam-splitting ratio quantitatively. The influence of angular divergence and crystal absorption are considered in the simulation. The angular divergence broadens the bandwidth of the diffraction, thereby reducing diffraction intensity. The crystal absorption results in asymmetry and peak shift of the transmission curve and affects the intensity of diffraction and the intensity of transmission beam. The experimental results show that the non-dispersive (+n,-n) configuration can effectively eliminate the influence of angle divergence. The beam-splitting ratio can be adjusted in a small range (±2%) by changing the in-plane angle and adjusted in a wide range (±75%) by changing the crystal thickness, thereby realizing the quantitative modulation of the intensity of transmission and diffraction beam.