Simulation of Optical Transport Beamlines for High-quality Optical Beams for Accelerator Applications

High-quality optical beams play already an important role in the field of particle accelerators which will most probably become even more prominent in the view of laser-driven particle accelerators. Nowadays, optical transport systems are needed for particle generation in photo injectors, for particle acceleration in laser-driven plasma wakefield accelerators, for particle beam diagnostics such as synchrotron radiation monitoring systems, or for particle manipulation schemes e.g. for external seeding of free-electron lasers. For the latter case, also the photon beam transport to the user end-stations requires dedicated optical transport system. The utilized wavelengths range from the hard x-ray up to the far-infrared spectral range. Parameters like surface quality, polarization effects, damage thresholds in- and out-of-vacuum, mechanical stability, dispersion effect etc. need to be studied for the variaty of applications. Here, we present the simulation results of the optical transport beamline for the seeding setup at FLASH and give a comparision to our measurement results.
Proceedings of the 6th Int. Particle Accelerator Conf., IPAC2015, Richmond, VA, USA