Longitudinal phase space manipulation in energy recovering linac-driven free-electron lasers

Energy recovering an electron beam after it has participated in a free-electron laser (FEL) interaction can be quite challenging because of the substantial FEL-induced energy spread and the energy antidamping that occurs during deceleration. In the Jefferson Lab infrared FEL driver accelerator, such an energy recovery scheme was implemented by properly matching the longitudinal phase space throughout the recirculation transport by employing the so-called energy compression scheme. In the present paper, after presenting a single-particle dynamics approach of the method used to energy recover the electron beam, we report on experimental validation of the method obtained by measurements of the so-called “compression efficiency” and “momentum compaction” lattice transfer maps at different locations in the recirculation transport line. We also compare these measurements with numerical tracking simulations.