First lasing of the ALICE infra-red Free-Electron Laser

An Infra-Red (IR) oscillator Free-Electron Laser (FEL) was installed into the test facility ALICE (Accelerators and Lasers In Combined Experiments) at Daresbury Laboratory at the end of 2009. First lasing was achieved at a wavelength of 8μm in October 2010. This is the first demonstration in the UK of a FEL operating in the Compton regime. This paper describes the installed hardware, the pre-alignment techniques, the diagnostics used to detect and characterise the IR output, the first measurements of the FEL output parameters and the plans for future development and exploitation of the FEL.