Water-cooled, in-cavity apertures for high power operation of FEL oscillators

In an oscillator FEL, higher-order harmonic radiation from wigglers can cause serious damage to the downstream FEL resonator mirror and limit the maximum electron beam current for FEL operation due to thermal overload. These problems can be effectively dealt with for FELs driven by helical wigglers using a system to block off-axis wiggler harmonic radiation. In this paper, we report a new scheme to block the off-axis radiation from helical wigglers using a set of motorized, water-cooled, in-cavity apertures. These apertures can reduce the wiggler harmonic radiation power load on the downstream FEL resonator mirror by two orders of magnitude or more. With these apertures, we were able to operate the Duke FEL with record high intracavity power in infrared and visible wavelengths and extend FEL operation into ultraviolet wavelengths with a large electron beam current. The technique for limiting wiggler harmonic radiation using in-cavity apertures is expected to be useful for other types of FEL oscillators including high average power FEL oscillators driven by superconducting linacs.