Suppression of the pulsed regimes appearing in free-electron lasers using feedback control of an unstable stationary state

Phys Rev E Stat Nonlin Soft Matter Phys. 2004 Apr;69(4 Pt 2):045502. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevE.69.045502. Epub 2004 Apr 29.

Abstract

We show that the pulsed regimes observed in free-electron lasers (FELs) can be suppressed using feedback control. By applying tiny parameter perturbations, the feedback allows to keep the systems onto a stationary state that is naturally existing in phase space, but is usually inaccessible because of its unstable nature. We test this method numerically on a master equation derived from the classical iterative model. Then we present the experimental results obtained on the super-ACO FEL. This method is in principle directly applicable to the other free-electron lasers, whose instabilities have a dynamical (deterministic) origin.