A Proof-Of-Principle Echo-Enabled Harmonic Generation Experiment at SLAC

In this paper we describe the technical design of an ongoing proof-of-principle echo-enabled harmonic generation (EEHG) experiment at the Next Linear Collider Test Accelerator (NLCTA) at SLAC.We present the design considerations and the technical details of the experiment. Recently a new method, entitled echo-enabled harmonic generation, was proposed for generation of high harmonics using the beam echo effect. In an EEHG free electron laser (FEL), an electron beam is energy modulated in a modulator and then sent through a dispersive section with a high dispersion strength. After this first stage, the modulation obtained in the modulator is macroscopically washed out, while simultaneously introducing complicated fine structure (separated energy bands) into the phase space of the beam. A second laser is used to further modulate the beam energy in a second modulator. After passing through a second dispersive section, the separated energy bands will be converted into current modulation and the echo signal then occurs as a recoherence effect caused by the mixing of the correlations between the modulation in the second modulator and the fine structures in the beam. The EEHG scheme has a remarkable up-frequency conversion efficiency; it has been shown that the EEHG FEL scheme may allow generation of soft x-rays directly from a UV seed laser in a single stage. In order to confirm the physics behind the EEHG technique and benchmark the theory, a proof-of-principleEEHG experimentwas planned at SLAC. The experiment is now in a commissioning stage and the preliminary results are reported in a separate paper of these proceedings. In this paper we present the design considerations and the details of the experiment setup