High-transformer-ratio plasma-based afterburner for extending X-ray free-electron laser photon energies to 50 keV

Bright coherent X-rays in the 50 keV range are highly desirable for applications in materials science, high-energy-density physics, and nuclear physics, but are difficult to obtain from present X-ray free-electron laser (XFEL) facilities. Plasma-based afterburners offer a compact route to increasing the electron-beam energy, yet high transformer ratio (TR) operation is vulnerable to hosing instability, which can severely degrade the witness beam quality. We propose using a transversely elliptical driver beam to excite an elliptical nonlinear plasma wake with an axially varying focusing gradient, thereby suppressing the witness beam hosing through betatron decoherence. Three-dimensional particle-in-cell simulations show that, for a 3 kA driver and a 2.35 kA witness beam with an rms length of 4 μm and a beam separation of 94 μm (TR ≈ 3), this scheme can accelerate an 8 GeV witness beam to ~30 GeV while nearly half of the electrons meet the XFEL requirements. Start-to-end simulations show that the resulting beam can drive 50 keV XFEL radiation with peak powers of ~10 GW and durations of ~10 fs, even when quantum diffusion is included, offering a compact route to extend existing XFEL facilities to higher photon energies.