Free Electron Lasers (FELs) are unlike conventional lasers. Conventional lasers use transitions between atomic energy levels to produce light at a fixed wavelength. FELs accelerate and decelerate electron beams to make them produce light. There are a variety of ways of achieving this - by using magnetic fields or simply passing the electron beam near the surface of a material.
This page was set up for the seminar on FELs I had to give as part of my Physics MSci degree at Bristol University, UK.
FELs at Stanford
University
FELs at University of California, Santa
Barbara
FELs at the
University of Tokyo
An
online book on FELs
WWW Virtual Library entry for FELs
AltaVista
search for "Free Electron Laser"
"Classical Electrodynamics (2nd Edition)" by J. D. Jackson, Wiley (1975) - A classic book on electrodynamics that will help when trying to understand the other books.
"Elements of Quantum Optics" by P. Meystre & M. Sargent III, Springer-Verlag (1990), pp. 26--36 - A good book, with the most accessible explaination of FELs that I found. This is really just an introductory explanation.
"Free Electron Lasers" by T. C. Marshall, Macmillan Publishing (1985) - One of the definitive books on FELs - it's referenced frequently. This is between "Elements of Quantum Optics" and "Lectures on the Free Electron Laser..." in difficulty. If you want to understand more than just the basics, then you should read this.
"Lectures on the Free Electron Laser and Related Topics" by G. Dattoli, A. Renieri, A. Torre, World Scientific Publishing (1993) - A book I found very hard to understand. Around page 200 it becomes easier to understand, and has some nice explanations of the Cerenkov and Smith-Purcell effects.
These are the most interesting papers that I found & managed to understand at some level.
"History of the Ubitron", R. M. Phillips, Nucl. Inst. & Meth. A (1988) A272 1-9 - Actually, this whole volume is about FELs.
"Free Electron Lasers", H. P. Freund, R. K. Parker, Scientific American (April 1989), pp. 56-61 - A gentle introduction to FELs.
"Travelling-wave Free-Electron Laser", E. Jerby, Phys. Rev. A (1991) 44 703-715
"First Observation of Smith-Purcell Radiation from Relativistic Electrons", G. Doucas, J. H. Mulvey, M. Omori, J. Walsh, M. F. Kimmit, Phys. Rev. Lett. (1992) 69 1761-1764
"Cheap Free Electron Lasers on the Horizon", G. Dattoli, A. Renieri, Physics World (January 1993) pp. 25-26
"Soliton Solutions for Free-Electron-Laser Applications", A. Sen, G. L. Johnston, Phys. Rev. Lett. (1993) 70 786-789
"Free-Electron-Laser Model without the Slowly-Varying-Envelope Approximation, E. H. Haselhoff, Phys. Rev. E (1994) 49 R47-R50
"Mixed Signals for Free-Electron Lasers", Physics World (October 1994), pp. 6-7