High gradient, high reliability, and low wakefield accelerating structures for the FERMI FEL

The FERMI seeded free-electron laser (FEL), located at the Elettra laboratory in Trieste, is a 4th generation light source operating in the vacuum ultraviolet to soft X-rays range. The FEL design is based on an external seeding scheme which improves the output pulse coherence and the central wavelength control and reduces the spectral bandwidth. FERMI has achieved its original energy target by producing photon energies above 300 eV from a 1.50 GeV, 600 A peak current, electron beam. However, there is a strong scientific motivation to push the energy envelop further higher to photon energy up to 600 eV to cover both the x-ray absorption edges of nitrogen K (400 eV) and oxygen K (532 eV). To achieve this goal, the electron beam energy will be increased from 1.50 GeV to 1.80 GeV and the peak beam current will be pushed towards 1 kA. This requires essentially the development of more reliable high gradient S-band accelerating structures, with low wakefields contribution up to 1 nC charge per bunch. Accordingly, in the following, we present the design of high gradient, high reliability, and low wakefield S-band accelerating structures for the upgrade program of the FERMI linac.