Start-to-end beam-dynamics simulations of a compact C-band electron beam source for high spectral brilliance applications

Proposals for new linear accelerator-based facilities are flourishing world-wide with the aim of high spectral brilliance radiation sources. Most of these accelerators are based on electron beams, with a variety of applications in industry, research and medicine such as colliders, free-electron lasers, wake-field accelerators, coherent THz and inverse Compton scattering X/’ sources as well as high-resolution diagnostics tools in biomedical science. In order to obtain high-quality electron beams in a small footprint, we present the optimization design of a C-band linear accelerator machine. Driven by a novel compact C-band hybrid photoinjector, it will yield ultra-short electron bunches of few 100’s pC directly from injection with ultra-low emittance, fraction of mm-mrad, and a few hundred fs length simultaneously, therefore satisfying full 6D emittance compensation. The normal-conducting linacs are based on a novel high-efficiency design with gradients up to 50 MV/m. The beam maximum energy can be easily adjusted in the mid-GeV’s range. In this paper, we discuss the start-to-end beam-dynamics simulations in details.