Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory

We propose a significant enhancement of the electron peak current entering a SASE undulator by inducing an energy modulation in an upstream wiggler magnet via resonant interaction with an optical laser, followed by microbunching of the energy-modulated electrons at the accelerator exit. This current enhancement allows a reduction of the FEL gain length. The x-ray output consists of a series of uniformly spaced spikes, each spike being temporally coherent. The duration of this series is controlled by the laser pulse and in principle can be narrowed down to just a single, ~;200-attosecond spike. Given potentially absolute temporal synchronization of the x-ray spikes to the energy-modulating laser pulse, this scheme naturally makes pump-probe experiments available to SASE FEL's. We also study various detrimental effects related to the high electron peak current.