Transverse-coherence properties of the FEL at the LCLS

The recently commissioned Linac Coherent Light Source is an x-ray free-electron laser at the SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, which is now operating at x-ray wavelengths of 20-1.2 Angstrom with peak brightness nearly ten orders of magnitude beyond conventional synchrotron sources. Understanding of coherence properties of the radiation from SASE FELs at LCLS is of great practical importance for some user experiments. We present the numerical analysis of the coherence properties at different wavelengths based on a fast algorithmusing ideal and start-end simulated FEL fields. The sucessful commissioning and operation of the linac coherent light source (LCLS) [1] has demonstrated that the x-ray free-electron laser (FEL) has come of age; these types of x-ray sources are poised to revolutionize the ultra-fast x-ray sciences. The LCLS and other hard x-ray FELs under construction are based on the principle of self-amplified spontaneous emission (SASE) [2, 3], where the amplification process starts from the shot noise in the electron beam. A large number of transverse radiation modes are also excited when the electron beam enters the undulator. The FEL collective instability in the electron beam causes the modulation of the electron density to increase exponentially, and after sufficient undulator distances, a single transverse mode starts to dominate. As a result, SASE FEL is almost fully coherent in the transverse dimension. Understanding of transverse coherence properties of the radiation from SASE FELs is of great practical importance. The longitudinal coherence properties of SASE FELs have been studied before [4]. Some studies on the transverse coherence can be found in previous papers, for example, in ref. [5, 6, 7, 8, 9]. In this paper, we first discuss a new numerical algorithm based on Markov chain Monte Carlo techniques to calculate the FEL transverse coherence. Then we focus on the numerical analysis of the LCLS FEL transverse coherence