Simulation of the microbunching instability in beam delivery systems for free electron lasers

In this paper, we examine the growth of the microbunching instability in the electron beam delivery system of a free electron laser (FEL). We present the results of two sets of simulations, one conducted using a direct Vlasov solver, the other using a particle-in-cell code Impact-Z with the number of simulation macroparticles ranging up to 100 million. Discussion is focused on the details of longitudinal dynamics and on numerical values of uncorrelated (slice) energy spread at different points in the lattice. In particular, we assess the efficacy of laser heater in suppression of the instability, and look at the interplay between physical and numerical noise in particle-based simulations.