Status of the LCLS x-ray FEL program (invited)

The Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) program involves a collaboration of several U.S. National Laboratories and universities with the goal of designing and building the first fourth-generation hard x-ray source, an x-ray free-electron laser (FEL). This FEL will utilize extremely short, intense, low-emittance electron pulses created by the high-energy linear accelerator at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. The FEL radiation produced will feature unprecedented peak brightness, short pulse length, and spatial coherence, tunable over an energy range of 0.8-8 keV. With favorable funding, major construction will begin by 2004 and the LCLS will be operating late in 2006. The LCLS facility will include experimental stations for carrying out groundbreaking experiments in several scientific fields. Current research and development efforts are directed at experimentally studying the physics of high-gain FELs, and refining the details of the plan for the LCLS facility. The FEL experiments, at Argonne and Brookhaven National Labs (along with experiments carried out at the German laboratory DESY), have confirmed the basic physical concepts upon which LCLS is based, and have demonstrated that many of the stringent technical requirements can already be met. (C) 2002 American Institute of Physics.