Accelerating the convergence of free electron laser simulations by retrieving a spatially coherent component of microbunching

A simple method to reduce the numerical cost in free electron laser (FEL) simulations is presented, which is based on retrieving a spatially coherent component of microbunching to suppress artifact effects that can potentially overestimate the FEL gain; this significantly reduces the number of macroparticle to reach the numerical convergence and enables the computation of amplified radiation with semianalytical formulas. Examples of FEL simulations performed to demonstrate the proposed method show that the computation time to get a reliable result is reduced by 1–2 orders of magnitude depending on the simulation condition. Published by the American Physical Society 2024