Laser Undulator X-Ray Source (LUX)

The LUX beam line will provide few-fs long X-ray pulses generated by electrons passing through an undulator formed by a period magnetic structure. The electrons are injected by and accelerated in a gas target hit by a very high-intensity laser pulse. The extremely high electromagnetic gradients generated by the driving laser pulse within the target plasma enable the electrons to reach energies of from hundreds of MeV to a few GeV within distances of a few millimeters or centimeters. The plasma target will be diagnosed with additional auxiliary laser beams providing more insight into the fascinating electron acceleration process. Paired with the electron beam’s additional diagnostics and the X-ray pulses that are eventually produced, the LUX beamline will not only be a user friendly beam line, but also an experimental platform in itself, one of the key steps leading to compact X-ray Free-electron Lasers.

The LUX beamline is being developed through collaboration between the University of Hamburg (UH) and ELI Beamlines. The beam line will first be developed, built and tested at the UH site at DESY, Hamburg, where it will be driven by a 200 TW laser system. The commissioning of the beam line at the ELI-Beamlines site in Dolní Břežany will commence in January 2017. The LUX will eventually be driven by a Petawatt class L3 laser with 10 Hz repetition rate, equipped with additional plasma diagnostics and two auxiliary beams derived from the L3 laser pulses. These auxiliary beams, which provide 30 fs 5 mJ and < 7 fs pulses, will be used both for user pump and probe experiments and for the LUX plasma diagnostics. The first users arrived in first half of 2018.