Beam instability and microbunching due to coherent synchrotron radiation

Abstract

A relativistic electron beam moving in a circular orbit in free space can radiate coherently if the wavelength of the synchrotron radiation exceeds the length of the bunch. In accelerators coherent synchrotron radiation of the bunch is usually suppressed by the shielding effect of the conducting walls of the vacuum chamber. However an initial density fluctuation with a characteristic length much shorter than the bunch length can radiate coherently. If the radiation reaction force results in the growth of the initial fluctuation, one can expect an instability which leads to microbunching of the beam and an increased coherent radiation at short wavelengths. Such an instability is studied theoretically in this paper.