Beam dynamics performances and applications of a low-energy electron-beam magnetic bunch compressor

Many front-end applications of electron linear accelerators rely on the production of temporally compressed bunches. The shortening of electron bunches is often realized with magnetic bunch compressors located in high-energy sections of accelerators. Magnetic compression is subject to collective effects including space charge and self interaction via coherent synchrotron radiation. In this paper we explore the application of magnetic compression to low-energy ( ∼ 40 MeV ) , high-charge (nC) electron bunches with low normalized transverse emittances ( < 5 μ m ) .