Undulator commissioning by characterization of radiation in x-ray free electron lasers

In x-ray free electron lasers (XFELs) where a long undulator composed of many segments is installed, there exist a number of error sources to reduce the FEL gain such as the trajectory error, K value discrepancy, and phase mismatch, which are related to the segmented-undulator structure. Undulator commissioning, which refers to the tuning and alignment processes to eliminate the possible error sources, is thus an important step toward realization of lasing. In the SPring-8 angstrom compact free electron laser (SACLA) facility, the undulator commissioning has been carried out by means of characterization of x-ray radiation, i.e., measurements of the spatial and spectral profiles of monochromatized spontaneous undulator radiation as well as by probing the FEL intensity. The achieved tuning and alignment accuracies estimated from the statistics of actual measurements in SACLA show the effectiveness of this commissioning scheme.