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Soft X-ray monochromators for synchrotron radiation sources have been continuously developed over the years, improving energy resolution and stability. Great effort has been made in improving the surface quality of the optics involved, reaching values permitting diffraction-limited images. Still, one problem has not been solved, nor fully understood, yet: groove placing errors. Nowadays, these are one of the major factors responsible for resolving the power reduction of diffraction-gratings-based X-ray monochromators. Despite decades of use of gratings, there is not yet a universally established method for predicting and simulating the effect of groove placing errors on monochromator performance. This is especially important in the new scenario of high-coherent X-ray sources, i.e. diffraction-limited storage rings and free-electron lasers. To address this problem, in this article an approach based on WISER (Wavefront propagatIon Simulation codE libRary) is presented. WISER is a physical optics simulation package, also available in the user-friendly Orange Synchrotron Radiation Suite - OASYS. Even though it was originally conceived to assess the focusing performance of X-ray mirrors in the presence of height defects, it perfectly simulates the performance of a periodic (or quasi-periodic) structure like a diffraction grating. In this article, the way to use WISER and its application to a specific case, e.g. the design of a monochromator for the upgrade of a beamline at the Advanced Light Source, are shown. A simple rule for estimating how well the grooves are placed on a grating, based on calculation of the Strehl ratio, is also presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The scope of this paper is to outline the main marks and performances of the MagneDyn beamline, which was designed and built to perform ultrafast magnetodynamic studies in solids. Open to users since 2019, MagneDyn operates with variable circular and linear polarized femtosecond pulses delivered by the externally laser-seeded FERMI free-electron laser (FEL). The very high degree of polarization, the high pulse-to-pulse stability, and the photon energy tunability in the 50–300 eV range allow performing advanced time-resolved magnetic dichroic experiments at the K-edge of light elements, e.g., carbon and at the M- and N-edge of the 3d-transition-metals and rare earth elements, respectively. To this end, two experimental end-stations are available. The first is equipped with an in situ dedicated electromagnet, a cryostat, and an extreme ultraviolet Wollaston-like polarimeter. The second, designed for carry-in user instruments, hosts also a spectrometer for pump-probe resonant x-ray emission and inelastic spectroscopy experiments with a sub-eV energy resolution. A Kirkpatrick-Baez active optics system provides a minimum focus of ∼ 20 × 20 μ m2 FWHM at the sample. A pump laser setup, synchronized with the FEL-laser seeding system, delivers sub-picosecond pulses with photon energies ranging from the mid-IR to near-UV for optical pump-FEL probe experiments with a minimal pump-probe jitter of few femtoseconds. The overall combination of these features renders MagneDyn a unique state-of-the-art tool for studying ultrafast magnetic and resonant emission phenomena in solids. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Free-electron lasers (FELs) are the most advanced class of light-sources, by virtue of their unique capability to lase high-brightness pulses characterized by wavelengths spanning the extreme-ultraviolet, the soft and hard X-ray spectral domains, as well as by temporal lengths lying in the femtosecond (fs) timescale. The next step to push the current standards in ultrafast X-ray science is strongly linked to the possibility of engineering and exploiting time-resolved experiments exclusively for FELs pulses, ideally having different colors tunable at specific electronic resonance of the chemical elements. At the seeded FERMI FEL (Trieste, Italy) this goal is committed to the optical device known as AC/DC, which stands for the auto correlator/delay creator. AC/DC is designed to double the incoming FEL pulse splitting the photon beam by inserting a grazing incidence flat mirror, thus preserving the spectral and temporal properties, and further delaying one of these two pulses in time. It can independently tune the FEL pulses fluence on the two optical paths by means of solid-state filters, too. Here, we present a detailed description about this optical device. Strong emphasis is dedicated to the AC/DC opto-mechanical design and to the laser-based feedback systems implemented to compensate for any mismatch affecting the FEL optical trajectory, ascribable to both mechanical imperfections and paraxial errors rising during a temporal delay scan. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

FERMI is the first and only seeded EUV‐SXR free‐electron laser (FEL) facility available to users; it operates at Elettra – Sincrotrone Trieste (Italy) and it presents five operating endstations. Three of them, namely LDM (Low Density Matter), DiProI (Diffraction and Projection Imaging) and MagneDyn (Magneto‐Dynamical studies), use a Kirkpatrick–Baez (KB) active X‐ray optics system to focus the FEL pulses into the experimental chambers. The present work reports on the final results of the upgraded KB Active Optics Systems (KAOS), which have been mechanically modified in order to improve stability and repeatability with respect to the original design. The results have been obtained on both the FERMI FEL lines, FEL1 and FEL2, and are particularly relevant for the latter as it is the low‐wavelength line recently opened to users. After a thorough description of the new mechanical layout of the system and the aspects that have been improved after the refurbishment, a set of simulations of the optical performances are presented. The code used to simulate the behavior of KAOS is WISEr, a physical‐optics‐based tool, which is freely accessible, and integrated into the Oasys platform, that takes into account the specific surface metrology characterization of the beamline mirrors, including figure errors and microroughness power spectral density. The results of WISEr are then used as a reference for the actual optimization of the optical system. This procedure relies heavily on a wavefront sensor (WFS) mounted out of focus to optimize the refocusing mirrors alignment as well as their curvature bending (by minimization of the coefficients of the Zernike wavefront expansion). Moreover, the WFS data are used to reconstruct the focal spot parameters by means of a back‐propagation of the electric field. Finally, these results are compared with those obtained after the FEL ablation of a PMMA layer positioned on the focal plane, and analyzed ex situ in a post‐mortem fashion. The mechanically refurbished optical system and the multi‐technique alignment approach, aimed at optimizing the mirrors' curvature, pitch and roll angles, allowed a focal spot of 1.8 µm × 2.4 µm at 4.14 nm wavelength (FEL2) to be inferred, confirmed by the PMMA ablation imprints. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Laser‐slicing at a diffraction‐limited storage ring light source in the soft X‐ray region is investigated with theoretical and numerical modelling. It turns out that the slicing efficiency is favoured by the ultra‐low beam emittance, and that slicing can be implemented without interference to the standard multi‐bunch operation. Spatial and spectral separation of the sub‐picosecond radiation pulse from a hundreds of picosecond‐long background is achieved by virtue of 1:1 imaging of the radiation source. The spectral separation is enhanced when the radiator is a transverse gradient undulator. The proposed configuration applied to the Elettra 2.0 six‐bend achromatic lattice envisages total slicing efficiency as high as 10−7, one order of magnitude larger than the demonstrated state‐of‐the‐art, at the expense of pulse durations as long as 0.4 ps FWHM and average laser power as high as ∼40 W. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Free-electron lasers (FELs) in the extreme ultraviolet (XUV) and X-ray regime opened up the possibility for experiments at high power densities, in particular allowing for fluencedependent absorption and scattering experiments to reveal non-linear light-matter interactions at ever shorter wavelengths. Findings of such non-linear effects are met with tremendous interest, but prove difficult to understand and model due to the inherent shot-toshot fluctuations in photon intensity and the often structured, non-Gaussian spatial intensity profile of a focused FEL beam. Presently, the focused beam is characterized and optimized separately from the actual experiment. Here, we present the simultaneous measurement of XUV diffraction signals from solid samples in tandem with the corresponding single-shot spatial fluence distribution on the actual sample. Our in situ characterization scheme enables direct monitoring of the sample illumination, providing a basis to optimize and quantitatively understand FEL experiments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Time-resolved investigations have begun a new era of chemistry and physics, enabling the monitoring in real time of the dynamics of chemical reactions and matter. Induced transient optical absorption is a basic ultrafast electronic effect, originated by a partial depletion of the valence band, that can be triggered by exposing insulators and semiconductors to sub-picosecond extreme-ultraviolet pulses. Besides its scientific and fundamental implications, this process is very important as it is routinely applied in free-electron laser (FEL) facilities to achieve the temporal superposition between FEL and optical laser pulses with tens of femtoseconds accuracy. Here, a set of methodologies developed at the FERMI facility based on ultrafast effects in condensed materials and employed to effectively determine the FEL/laser cross correlation are presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The potential of the two-color mode implemented at the FERMI free-electron laser (FEL) source for pumping and probing selectively different atomic species has been demonstrated by time-resolved scattering experiments with permalloy (FeNi alloy) and NiFe2O4 samples. We monitored the ultra-fast demagnetization of Ni induced by the pump FEL pulse, by tuning the linearly-polarized FEL probe pulse to the Ni-3p resonance and measuring the scattered intensity in the transverse magneto-optical Kerr effect geometry. The measurements were performed by varying the intensity of the FEL pump pulse, tuning its wavelength to and off of the Fe-3p resonance, and by spanning the FEL probe pulse delays across the 300-900 fs range. The obtained results have evidenced that for the case of NiFe2O4, there is a sensible difference in the magnetic response at the Ni site when the pump pulse causes electronic excitations at the Fe site. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A new high-performance method for the free-electron laser (FEL) focused beam diagnosis has been successfully tested at the FERMI FEL in Trieste, Italy. The novel pixelated phosphor detector (PPD) consists of micrometric pixels produced by classical UV lithography and dry etching technique, fabricated on a silicon substrate, arranged in a hexagonal geometry and filled with suitable phosphors. It has been demonstrated that the overall resolution of the system has increased by reducing the diffusion of the light in the phosphors. Various types of PPD have been produced and tested, demonstrating a high resolution in the beam profile and the ability to measure the actual spot size shot-to-shot with an unprecedented resolution. For these reasons, the proposed detector could become a reference technique in the FEL diagnosis field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The future Magneto Dynamics (MagneDyn) beamline will be devoted to study the electronic states and the local magnetic properties of excited and transient states of complex systems by means of the time-resolved X-ray absorption spectroscopy technique. The beamline will use FERMI's high-energy source covering the wavelength range from 60 nm down to 1.3 nm. An on-line photon energy spectrometer will allow spectra to be measured with high resolution while delivering most of the beam to the end-stations. Downstream the beam will be possibly split and delayed, by means of a delay line, and then focused with a set of active Kirkpatrick-Baez mirrors. These mirrors will be able to focus the radiation in one of the two MagneDyn experimental chambers: the electromagnet end-station and the resonant inelastic X-ray scattering end-station. After an introduction of the MagneDyn scientific case, the layout will be discussed showing the expected performances of the beamline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Measurement of the emission wavelength and the spectral content of the photon radiation is essential information for both machine and experimental physicists at a free-electron laser (FEL) user facility. Knowledge of the photon beam spectral properties is needed during the machine optimization and for performing machine studies ( i.e. monitoring the change of the FEL output as a function of the machine parameters). The experimentalists, on the other hand, need to know the photon beam spectral distribution of the source, shot to shot, to discriminate the acquired data. Consequently, the main requirement for the instrument, supposed to obtain this information, is the capability of working on-line and shot-to-shot, with minimal perturbation of the beam delivered to the experimental stations. Starting from the grating fundamental equations, the conceptual design of the FERMI Pulse-Resolved Energy Spectrometer: Transparent and On-line (PRESTO) is presented, explaining the optical design in detail. The performance of PRESTO, in terms of resolving power, efficiency and spectral response, is also discussed. Finally, some useful features beyond the usual measurement of the energy spectrum are reported, as they have been routinely used by both machine and experimental physicists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

TeraFERMI is the new terahertz (THz) beamline for pump-probe studies on the femtosecond time-scale, under construction at the FERMI free-electron laser (FEL) facility in Trieste, Italy. The beamline will take advantage of the coherent radiation emitted by the spent electrons from the FEL undulators, before being dumped. This will result in short, coherent, high-power THz pulses to be used as a pump beam, in order to modulate structural properties of matter, thereby inducing phase transitions. The TeraFERMI beamline collects THz radiation in the undulator hall and guides it along a beam pipe which is approximately 30 m long, extending across the safety hutch and two shielding walls. Here the optical design, which will allow the efficient transport of the emitted THz radiation in the experimental hall, is presented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Low Density Matter (LDM) beamline has been built as part of the FERMI free-electron laser (FEL) facility to serve the atomic, molecular and cluster physics community. After the commissioning phase, it received the first external users at the end of 2012. The design and characterization of the LDM photon transport system is described, detailing the optical components of the beamline. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: X-ray mirrors with high focusing performances are in use in both mirror modules for X-ray telescopes and in synchrotron and FEL (Free Electron Laser) beamlines. A degradation of the focus sharpness arises in general from geometrical deformations and surface roughness, the former usually described by geometrical optics and the latter by physical optics. In general, technological developments are aimed at a very tight focusing, which requires the mirror profile to comply with the nominal shape as much as possible and to keep the roughness at a negligible level. However, a deliberate deformation of the mirror can be made to endow the focus with a desired size and distribution, via piezo actuators as done at the EIS-TIMEX beamline of FERMI@Elettra. The resulting profile can be characterized with a Long Trace Profilometer and correlated with the expected optical quality via a wavefront propagation code. However, if the roughness contribution can be neglected, the computation can be performed via a ray-tracing routine, and, under opportune assumptions, the focal spot profile (the Point Spread Function, PSF) can even be predicted analytically. The advantage of this approach is that the analytical relation can be reversed; i.e., from the desired PSF the required mirror profile can be computed easily, thereby avoiding the use of complex and time-consuming numerical codes. The method can also be suited in the case of spatially inhomogeneous beam intensities, as commonly experienced at synchrotrons and FELs. In this work we expose the analytical method and the application to the beam shaping problem. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]