Laser‐slicing at a low‐emittance storage ring.

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]