Sensitivity of EEHG Simulations to Dynamic Beam Parameters

Abstract Currently, the Free electron laser user facility FLASH at DESY is undergoing a significant upgrade involving the complete transformation of one of its beamlines to allow external seeding. With the Echo-Enabled Harmonic Generation (EEHG) seeding method, we aim for the generation of fully coherent XUV and soft X-ray pulses at wavelengths down to 4 nm. The generated FEL radiation is sensitive to various electron beam properties, e.g., its energy profile imprinted either deliberately or by collective effects such as Coherent Synchrotron Radiation (CSR). In dedicated particle tracking simulations, one usually makes certain assumptions concerning the beam properties and the collective effects to simplify implementation and analysis. Here, we estimate the influence of some of the common assumptions made in EEHG simulations on the properties of the output FEL radiation, using the example of FLASH and its proposed seeding beamline. We conclude that the inherent properties of the FLASH1 beam, namely the negatively chirped energy profile, has dominant effect on the spectral intensity profile of the radiators output compare to that of the CSR induced chirp.