The new IR and THz FEL facility at the Fritz Haber Institute in Berlin

Abstract

A mid-infrared oscillator FEL has been commissioned at the Fritz Haber Institute. The accelerator consists of a thermionic gridded gun, a subharmonic buncher, and two S-band standing-wave copper structures. It provides a final electron energy adjustable from 15 to 50 MeV, low longitudinal (&lt; 50 keV ps) and transverse emittance (&lt; 20 &pi;mm mrad), at more than 200 pC bunch charge with a micro-pulse repetition rate of 1 GHz and a macro-pulse length of up to 15 <i>µ</i>s. Pulsed radiation with up to 100 mJ macro-pulse energy at about 0.5% FWHM bandwidth is routinely produced in the wavelength range from 4 to 48 <i>µ</i>m. A characterization of the FEL performance in terms of pulse energy, bandwidth, and micro-pulse shape of the IR radiation is given. In addition, selected user results are presented. These include, for instance, spectroscopy of bio-molecules (peptides and small proteins) either conformer selected by ion mobility spectrometry or embedded in superfluid helium nano-droplets at 0.4 K, as well as vibrational spectroscopy of mass-selected metal-oxide clusters and protonated water clusters in the gas phase.