Operational Experience and Characterization of a Superconducting Transverse Gradient Undulator for Compact Laser Wakefield Accelerator-Driven FEL

A 40-period superconducting transverse gradient undulator (TGU) has been
designed and fabricated at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). Combining
a TGU with a Laser Wakefield Accelerator (LWFA) is a potential key for
realizing an extremely compact Free Electron Laser (FEL) radiation source.
The TGU scheme is a viable option to compensate the challenging properties
of the LWFA electron beam in terms of beam divergence and energy spread.
In this contribution, we report on the operational experience of this TGU
inside its own cryostat and show the current status of the TGU and the further
plan for experiments. This work is supported by the BMBF project 05K19VKA
PlasmaFEL (Federal Ministry of Education and Research).