The alpha-X beam line:toward a compact FEL

Recent progress in developing laser-plasma accelerators is raising the possibility of a compact coherent radiation source that could be housed in a medium sized university department. Furthermore, since the duration of electron bunches from laser-plasma based accelerators is fixed by the relativistic plasma wavelength, the radiation sources based on these accelerators can be of the order of a femtosecond. Beam properties from laser-plasma accelerators have been traditionally thought not to be of sufficient quality to produce amplification. Our work shows that this is not the case.