Concept for a Seeded FEL at FLASH2

The free-electron laser (FEL) FLASH is a user facility delivering photon pulses down to 4 nm wavelength. Recently, the second FEL undulator beamline 'FLASH2' was added to the facility. Operating in self-amplified spontaneous emission (SASE) mode, the exponential amplification process is initiated by shot noise of the electron bunch, resulting in photon pulses of limited temporal coherence. In seeded FELs, the FEL process is initiated by coherent seed radiation, improving the longitudinal coherence of the generated photon pulses. The conceptual design of a possible seeding option for the FLASH2 beamline foresees the installation of the hardware needed for high-gain harmonic generation (HGHG) seeding upstream of the already existing undulator system. In this contribution, we present the beamline design and numerical simulations of the seeded FEL. Proceedings of the 8th Int. Particle Accelerator Conf., IPAC2017, Copenhagen, Denmark