UCLA

Modern X-ray light sources generate synchrotron radiation from relativistic free electrons

passing through magnet arrays such as undulators. The frequency of the radiation scales

quadratically with the energy of the electrons. Conventional RF accelerators have limited

accelerating gradients that make reaching electron energies capable of producing hard

X-rays a dicult engineering demand that requires hundreds of meters of linac sections.

Next generation light sources aim to compactify the current sources by employing high

gradient advanced accelerators and very short period undulators. Small footprint, narrow

bandwidth X-ray sources can have a large impact on X-ray science and its applications

ranging from the medical eld to material science to the interrogation of the nuclear

structure of matter. In this dissertation, two approaches to the scaling down of X-ray

sources are taken up. The performance of a free electron laser (FEL) based on sub-mm

period undulators is studied on theoretical grounds. The experimental realization of an

all-optical scheme is demonstrated. The output electron beam of an inverse free electron

laser (IFEL) accelerator, driven by a terawatt CO2 laser, is fed into an inverse Compton

scattering (ICS) collision with a retro-reflected CO2 laser pulse