Simulation of a cascaded longitudinal space charge amplifier for coherent radiation generation

Longitudinal space charge (LSC) effects are generally considered as harmful in free-electron lasers as they can seed unfavorable energy modulations that can result in density modulations with associated emittance dilution. This “micro-bunching instabilities” is naturally broadband and could possibly support the generation of coherent radiation over a broad region of the spectrum. Therefore there has been an increasing interest in devising accelerator beam lines capable of controlling LSC induced density modulations. In the present paper we refine these previous investigations by combining a grid-less space charge algorithm with the popular particle-tracking program elegant. This high-fidelity model of the space charge is used to benchmark conventional LSC models. We finally employ the developed model to investigate the performance of a cascaded LSC amplifier using beam parameters comparable to the ones achievable at Fermilab Accelerator Science & Technology (FAST) facility currently under commissioning at Fermilab.