Operational experience and characterization of a superconducting transverse gradient undulator for compact laser wakefield accelerator-driven FELs

A 40-period superconducting transverse gradient undulator (TGU) has been designed and fabricated at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT). Combining a TGU with a laser wakefield accelerator (LWFA) is a potential key for realizing extremely compact free electron laser (FELs) radiation sources. 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 first results of the characterization measurement, 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).